Wright-Designed Service Station Is a Gas

CLOQUET, Minn. — Can the lowly gas station ever be considered a work of art? It can--if Frank Lloyd Wright designed it.

“He wanted to put beauty into everything,” said Daryl McKinney, whose father-in-law, Ray Lindholm, commissioned Wright to design a gas station for him in this small northern Minnesota town.

“Even if something is to be a gas station, form would follow function. It would be pretty and attractive, not mundane.”

The Phillips 66 station, built in 1958, is the only gas station ever designed by Wright. Hailed as “revolutionary” at its opening, the full-service station has weathered the oil crisis of the 1970s, the depressed economy of the area and the rise of the convenience store. It still attracts hundreds of Wright buffs a year, McKinney says.

Nestled by the woods and lakes of the St. Louis River Valley, the station has been moderately successful over the years. It features four service bays for car repairs and also sells tires and batteries. Because it’s strictly a full-service station, it charges about 5 cents a gallon more for gas than its self-serve neighbors.

The building sprouted from Wright’s utopian vision known as Broadacre City, which he conceived during the Great Depression. Broadacre was meant to be unhurried and uncrowded, containing divided highways, regional shopping centers, glass-faced buildings and prefab housing. Wright enthusiasts say it was 25 years ahead of its time.

“Wright thought cities were disintegrating as inhabitable places to live. He felt they were getting too congested,” said Charles Montooth of Taliesin Institute in Spring Green, Wis., an architectural training center founded by Wright.

Broadacre City never materialized, but Wright’s service station did, at a total cost of just $50,000. Marked by its hat-shaped roof, copper shingles and a mast-like spire, the unassuming but elegant building was supposed to help shape the less urban America he envisioned.

Central to Wright’s design was the station’s cantilevered canopy, which juts 32 feet into space. Because it has no visible means of support, some early skeptics predicted that it would never stay up.

“His plans were, to put it mildly, difficult to carry out,” McKinney said.

Some plans were impossible to carry out. Overhanging gas pumps conceived by Wright would have eliminated the need for islands. But they didn’t meet fire codes and had to be scrapped.

Other facets of the plan grew problematic over the years, like the lounge in which Wright hoped customers would wait while their cars were being serviced.

“Customers can relax, watch television, or just sit and observe the countryside through large windows,” the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune proclaimed just before the station’s opening.

But that idea eventually soured. The lounge fell into disuse over the years because customers no longer wanted to wait. “People are in such a hurry, they don’t have time to sit and read a magazine for an hour or two,” McKinney lamented.

Wright also didn’t foresee the eventual popularity of self-service stations and gas station-convenience stores.

“He didn’t realize everybody would be in such a hurry today,” McKinney said. “Now they want to swing in there and pump their gas and maybe get a loaf of bread. They’re also putting in automatic teller machines, so people can get cash for the weekend.”

Wright never got to see his only gas station, though he sent a telegram to Lindholm congratulating him on its completion. The architect died in 1959 at age 90.

Today, the paint is peeling and many of the station’s skylights are leaking. Teen-agers occasionally break into the once-luxurious lounge, and the canopy is pockmarked from cars that have bashed into it over the years.

The McKinneys plan to clean up the station and give it a new paint job over the summer.