Cottage Home Service

Hired from Gulf Oil in late 1925 to lead the Pure Oil Company's new marketing construction department, architect Carl A. Peterson was charged with creating a structure distinct and recognizable, utilizing Pure Oil's blue and white corporate livery prominently in his design, making their corporate affiliation obvious from a distance. His goal was to harmonize with residential neighborhoods that opposed flashy and brightly colored industrial structures.

Pure Oil unveiled Peterson's final design in 1927, which he called the "English cottage." It featured a design reminiscent of private homes in an effort to make the stations comfortable for motorists and incorporated many aspects of the popular Tudor Revival architecture of the time. These included homey details such as chimneys, window shutters, and flowerboxes. The brick walls of the building were white, and the roof was covered in an expensive, non-fading, gloss blue tile. 
What now seems quite amusing in self-service times, imagine this service attendant's helpful comment: "This pipe fits behind that little door on the driver's side of your car. It's difficult, pal. That's why I do it for you."

What now seems quite amusing in self-service times, imagine this service attendant's helpful comment: "This pipe fits behind that little door on the driver's side of your car. It's difficult, pal. That's why I do it for you."

Peterson oversaw and designed many variations on his initial design to account for economic, geographic, and other regional differences. The English cottage became an icon for the company, with more constructed into the 1930s. Pure Oil produced popular birdhouses and radios designed to look like their stations. A half-size replica produced for the 1933 World's Fair was a top attraction. With Pure Oil's merger with Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) in 1965,  the English cottage style became a thing of the past. However, many have been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Dynamic 59 Guggenheim

Tooling around in your brand new 1961 Oldsmobile may have offered a bit of uniqueness but it was pale in comparison to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The Upper East Side landmark on Fifth Avenue, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was initially controversial to some traditionalists for its unusual shape and display arrangement. Their lack of vision for the building has long since been forgotten. Not completely forgotten is the classic Oldsmobile. 

Mr. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, began collecting works of the old masters in the 1890s. He met artist Hilla von Rebay, the museum's first director. In 1926, she introduced him to European avant-garde art. She envisioned a space that would facilitate a new way of seeing modern art. Fast forward to 1943, they wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright asking him to design a structure to house and display the collections. Rebay thought the seventy-six-year-old Wright was dead, but Guggenheim's wife knew otherwise. It took Wright fifteen years, over 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings to create and complete the museum, after a series of difficulties and delays during the 1940s and subsequent personality conflicts with its new museum director during the early fifties. Wright's design for the Guggenheim incorporated geometric motifs, such as squares, circles, rectangles, triangles and lozenges. The building was completed in 1959 with an added annex and renovation in the last thirty years. It was Wright's last major work. He died six months before its opening, at ninety-one.

Power to The People

 

Completed in 1932, the Niagara Mohawk Building is an art deco classic building in Syracuse, New York and the former headquarters for the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, at the time the nation's largest electric utility company. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Niagara Hudson Building in 2010. Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation is a New York State utility company, whose name was adopted in 1950 from fifty-nine former companies known as Niagara Hudson Power Corporation. The St. Lawrence Seaway was an integral part of their future. The Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation designation was retired after the acquisition by the UK-based National Grid. They provide electricity to 3.5 million customers in Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island.