These historic photographs of mimetic architecture are pure roadside Americana
Eye-catching buildings that look like the things sold inside said buildings
Just so there’s no confusion, this giant shoe is a cobbler. That huge orange sells only orange juice, and the cowboy hat over there? That’s just a gas station. Disappointing if you’re in the market for headwear. But point proven: we got your attention. And mimetic buildings are nothing if they aren’t grabbing eyeballs.
These roadside attractions-cum-marketing campaigns were developed as a novel way to attract customers on the burgeoning highways of midcentury America. Proprietors were banking on the fact that, scoped from a distance, travelers could quickly glean a sense of what was on offer (or at least have their curiosity piqued enough to investigate). The ubiquity of mimetic shops came rapidly, rising alongside the expansion of highways and increased car ownership—one of a handful of vernacular architectural movements with distinctly American characteristics.
Yet, as postwar interstate construction shifted the traditional transit routes and local economies of America’s small towns, the role of mimetic storefronts in hard to reach places was losing steam. As getting drivers’ attention became about branding and name recognition, the quirky humor of buildings that looked like what they sold began to disappear. As the country sped up, the message projected by these quaint totems to an older order of commerce simply got lost in the slipstream of strip malls and fast food chains. As historian Robert Zaretsky put it, “Complexity is catastrophic.”
By the time photographer John Margolies got to them in the 1970s, most of these structures were in disrepair—abandoned or repurposed. But even if that giant milk bottle is now selling Vietnamese food, one can still sense in its continued existence something of the malleability (and promise) of American pragmatism. Our exaggerated national panorama is constantly undulating between highs and lows, successes and failures. Mimetic buildings, these “exclamation points of the landscape,” as architecture critic Paul Goldberger put it in 1981, are a reminder that entrepreneurialism is always a product of its time.
