What will remain of gas stations?

This article was originally published on Domus 1090, May 2024

Not much more than a century ago, our towns and cities were full of stables and blacksmiths’ forges, where the horses that pulled carriages, carts and hansom cabs were fed hay and fitted with iron shoes. Gradually they were replaced by places where cars could be refuelled. Now perhaps those, too, are on the verge of becoming obsolete.

Most petrol stations aren’t things ofbeauty. But in a village called Birstall in Leicestershire, in the English Midlands, there’s the last survivor of the “Pegasus”stations designed in the 1960s by Eliot Noyes. Each of the six stands of pumpsis shaded by a circular canopy supported by a single pillar, like a parasol. It’s a space-age concept, and very evocative of its time, but somehow it still seems as futuristic as it did when the design came off the drawing board.

It was American artist Ed Ruscha who persuaded us to look at petrol stations in a different way. In 1963, when gasoline cost 30 cents per gallon in the USA, every car had a V8 engine and the supply of oil seemed inexhaustible, he created a book of photographs called Twenty six Gasoline Stations.

All in black and white, the images are presented in the leporello format, a folding book that opens like a concertina. Captions locating the stations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma are the only text. When it was first published, in an edition of 400 copies, you could buy it for 3 dollars. I’ve just seen a copy of that first edition, signed by the artist but with a badly torn cover, on offer for 4,000 dollars.

When something comes along to replace petrol stations, whether to charge the batteries of electric cars or to fill the tanks of hydrogen-powered vehicles, or to supply some form of energy production we haven’t thought of yet, perhaps there will be artists with the imagination of an Eliot Noyes and the eye of an Ed Ruschato create and make us see the beauty that can lie beyond their everyday function.