Lounging in the Wreck of the New Order

Who's up for some lounging!? Well, you won't be doing any here, nor using the ladies' room. The lounge is locked, and appears to be in an advanced state of dereliction. A recent trip to Minnesota's North Shore brought me through the town of Cloquet, home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station. This was built in 1956, and supposedly still functions as a service station, though I wondered if it has been abandoned. The observation deck/lounge, pictured at the left, was inaccessible, and littered with gloves, tools, and gas station detritus. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. I can't think of a better place to lounge than on a small town street corner in the Upper Midwest.


I did find the building to be quite intriguing, even if in need of some attention. The formal parallel with California Googie was really striking, though the materials were very different. The gas station was apparently derived from the Broadacre City Standardized Overhead Service Station project, from 1932, which I found suprising (though I should say that the Cloquet station doesn't feature the overhead gasoline delivery from the earlier proposal). Did Wright exert some influence on later Googie offerings, or perhaps the other way around? If anyone has bothered to research this question, I'd be interested in finding the answer, even though its a bit of a chicken/egg distinction. Whether or not any connection was explicit between Googie and Wright, something was certainly in the air.

Wright held the gas station to be a crucially important institution, specifically for its role in contributing to his Broadacre City ideal. He envisioned America becoming decentralized, cities disappearing into the prairie. The gas station, a seemingly insignificant vernacular structure, almost an accidental structure, would become an instrument whereby Americans can get back to an Arcadian ideal (or, put more properly, the Broadacre City was an Arcadia for the Modern Age - automobiles and atomic energy delivering us more intimately to Nature). With the advent of the service station, Wright declared, "The Old Order is Breaking Up".

Wright was correct, to some extent. Gas stations really did contribute significantly to the physical restructuring of the nation. And its delightful to think that by breaking up the old order we can get more directly to some lounging. Now, however, faced with rising gas prices and strip mall fatigue, Wright's ideal seems antiquated. Nevertheless, here in Cloquet, one can almost see what Wright was after. The gas station's observation deck, if one could get in, would display what once would have been a pretty nice vista, even if now the scene is muddied by encroaching urbanization.





As an aside, note the picture at left - the original gas station didn't really proclaim Wright's name. It advertised Phillip's 66.