Dealership Vernacular
When buildings are designed for drivers
A few months ago, my family leased a new car. As a first-time lessee, I had no idea how many hours we would have to spend sitting in the dealership before we could drive off the lot. As we swiveled in our chairs, signing our way through a massive pile of paper and entertaining a parade of upsells, I had a lot of time to consider the ceiling.
In this suburban dealership, the interior volume was vast like the subdivisions surrounding it. High above us, recessed lighting cast an ambient glow, even at high noon, which reminded me of the cabin of a Virgin America aircraft — a little clubby, purplish, possibly meant to connote the future or outerspace. I looked at the multi-story windows and thought about the Hayward fault. I wondered if a big quake would turn this whole local cluster of dealerships into giant, open-air car ports. Because that’s the thing: they are all basically designed the same — boxy glass envelopes containing rubber-scented air. And there’s no other category of building that’s really comparable. Dealership vernacular is unique unto itself.
It’s probably obvious that the elements of style in this case are driven by the need to attract customers and close sales. The glass, of course, makes display vehicles visible from the street. But a little digging into the history of dealership design reveals there’s more nuance than initially meets the eye with these places, and there’s reasoning behind each decision.
Going back to the early 20th century, auto manufacturers have been laying out rules and guidelines for the fleets of salespeople who move their inventory, and those rules translate into a litany of design specs. In 1948, General Motors released a thick manual called Planning Automobile Dealer Properties, which breaks down the features of a successful showroom, car lot, and service garage. Light — and more specifically, brightness — was a huge aspect of the design. “Surveys show that brightness is a top ranking factor in attracting attention and in arousing interest,” GM informs, “Brightness is the amount of light that objects reflect toward a viewer’s eye.” Indeed.
In the section entitled “General Composition of a Storefront,” dealers are told to attract customer attention through size, contrast, pattern, movement, color, and brightness, noting that daylight is superior. “On bright days, only showrooms shaped to use natural light can display cars effectively,” the guidebook instructs, “It is impractical to provide enough artificial light to compete with natural light on bright days.”
For obvious reasons, and increasingly so over the years, architects were designing these places with drive-by customers in mind. This meant, for example, that the showroom window needed to fit within a driver’s 60-degree field of vision, as opposed to the generous 180-degree range of a pedestrian.
Then of course there’s the question of what kinds of details can be processed from different distances and speeds. Why are dealerships so large-scale and blocky these days? The better to make an impression on someone passing at 65mph. Back when cars moved more slowly, dealership architects could justify decorative flourishes and elaborate detail, but not so any more.
In the book The American Car Dealership, author Robert Genat highlights the beautiful Stetler Dodge in York, Pennsylvania, which was built in the 1920s (Stetler Dodge still exists but the building looks like every other big-box dealership and the company’s website, sadly, does little to showcase the history):
The building Stetler constructed was a showplace in the Art Deco style. It featured custom tile work and semi-classical detailing above the large showroom windows…The building’s pitched roof was concealed by steps that led to a circular pediment. Within that pediment was a stained glass Dodge Brothers insignia with interlocking triangles…The showroom and mezzanine were trimmed in oak, and the showroom floor was covered in green tile. On one wall of the showroom was a fireplace.
It’s never been more fitting to say: They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Genat continues: “As the speed of traffic increased, these intricate patterns gave way to flowing lines and continuous moldings. In the late 1940s, lines gave way to mass, as the force needed to attract and impress fast-moving vehicular traffic became greater.” And so we end up with variations on this:
“It’s basically a giant sign,” says Adam Winig, founding principal of Arcsine, an architecture firm in Oakland, California. “Most brands want some kind of iconic element so that if you are driving on a freeway and passing the auto row of the town, you think, OK, there’s Honda’s blue H or VW’s yellow and white entry portal.” (That portal color scheme being from an earlier era; now VW uses a more minimalist, Apple-ified white.)
The dealership is part of the overall brand package, which means entire architectural structures get made over when a car company updates its identity. The voluminous glass box doesn’t change much, but colors, materials, logos, and messaging are redrafted to stay in step with the target demographic. Timelessness is neither a feature nor a goal of this subdiscipline. “It’s almost like hotels,” Winig remarks, “They know in 10 years it’ll look dated. I don’t see them trying to go for the 30–40–50 year design.”
He points out that the older, more stately dealerships reflected a different relationship with cars; families rarely had more than one vehicle, and it was a once- or maybe twice-in-a-lifetime purchase. It really was a big deal to cross through the grand entrance and present your intention to buy. Now it’s all theater, and the showroom, appropriately, feels like a set.
From an environmental point-of-view, this temporality is hardly endorsable (to say nothing of cars themselves), but from a retail design angle, it makes a lot of sense. Upon this stage the dealer can rotate the seasons’ fashions, and the sellers and buyer can act out their roles. Even the sales offices are essentially little sets — archetypes of tidy workspaces in which a revolving cast can take up their positions for a few hours. The offices are neither personalized nor entirely walled off — space is defined by the border between industrial-grade office carpeting and slick showroom tile. Winig chalks this up to the consumer transparency trend. You’re trading in the trust established through seeing your salesperson’s family photos on the desk for the reassurance that negotiations won’t — physically can’t — happen behind closed doors.
Once the sale has been made and hands firmly shaken, everyone expects the performance to close with a grand exit. This is a longstanding design requirement of most auto brands, Winig says: “The customer should be able to get into their brand new car right on the showroom floor, start it up, and drive straight out of the building.” It’s so important, in fact, that often a dedicated pass-through is built so that new cars can be pulled into the showroom just for the ceremonial crank of the ignition, only to leave moments later.
This emotional, triumphant farewell — the parting feeling the new-car owner is left with — is essential to locking in loyalty, ensuring that person will be back in a few years when they’re ready for an upgrade. And it really does work. Now, when I drive around in our newly leased car, I haven’t forgotten the hours I spent spinning in that task chair watching my signature devolve, but the memory has become a kind of easy dream. In it, I’m floating in the celestial reaches of the dealership, everything’s got a lavender hue, and below me all I see are clean, available cars, waiting to be mine.
