Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics Along America's Commercial Corridors

摘要

Trained as an architect, Martin Treu employs impressive detail in examining transformations in American downtowns, commercial strips, and shopping centers since the mid-nineteenth century. This encyclopedic survey "explores the nature of the signage Americans once put up and now have lost, as well as the architecture that it embellished" (p. 3), and entertains a desire to "see more layers of history permitted to overlap, to be on display simultaneously" (p. 322). Although an impressive bibliographical essay reveals Treu's historical, intellectual, and aesthetic roots, he confronts American commercial landscapes as an open-minded empiricist without a theoretical paradigm. The study is based on his personal observation of thirty cities, and on total immersion in such trade journals as Architectural Record, Chain Store Age, and, most notably, Signs of the Times.