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Frank Lloyd Wright's Public Buildings
A Guide to Frank Lloyd Wright Public Places: Wright Sites
An autobiography: Broadacre City
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Why
Frank Lloyd Wright would ever bother to design a gas station is beyond the
imagination of most. After all, he is famous for his designs of places
where people live – not where they take their cars for gas and service…
However, the design, from the Broadacre City Standardized Overhead
Service Station of 1932, is part of a master scheme that Wright had
devised in the 1930’s to create something of a Utopian, planned urban
development – in New York City of all places – that he called Broadacre
City. The gas station turned out to be the only part of Wright’s planned
city to ever be built; Broadacre City itself never materialized.
Watch
the little gas station.... In our present gasoline service station you may
see a crude beginning to such important advance decentralization; also see
the beginning of the future humane establishment we are now calling the free
city. Wherever service stations are located naturally these so often ugly
and seemingly insignificant features will survive and expand. [The new
city]... is all around us in the haphazard making, the apparent forces to
the contrary notwithstanding. All about us and no plan. The old order is
breaking up
-
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1930
In
any case, the Service Station was built in Cloquet, Minnesota in 1956 for
Mr. R.W. Lindholm; Wright had also designed a home ("Mäntylä") for the
Lindholm family in 1952 (also in Cloquet). The station’s original design
featured overhead gas lines that were changed to the ground-based pumps, due
to safety concerns. There is another, very distinct feature of the original
design that remains; a second floor waiting area for customers. The
all-glass enclosure above the service area is unfortunately no longer used
and is currently in a sorry state of disrepair. The painted cement-block
structure, with terne metal (a zinc-tin alloy) roof and cantilevered canopy
is truly a unique structure, especially when one also considers the
skylights and giant towering pylon that extends skyward from the roof.
Although the service station is still in use, it is sadly in a very run-down
condition and currently for sale.
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