Frank Lloyd Wright’s Little-Known Gas Station of the Future

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s plan for a reimagined urban or suburban development called Broadacre City was a vision and sociopolitical scheme where American families would be given single-acre plots of land from the federal land reserves and live in communities filled with Usonian houses. With few apartment dwellers and little emphasis on public transportation, residents would be heavily automobile-dependent, which would lead to a society where service stations would play a starring role. 

The R. W. Lindholm Service Station in Cloquet, Minnesota, is the only design from Wright’s utopian vision for the largely car-oriented Broadacre City that was actually realized—and the only gas station built to Wright’s design during his lifetime. (In 2014, however, a similarly designed but never-built station that Wright intended for Buffalo, New York, was reconstructed posthumously and exhibited at the Pierce-Arrow Museum.)

Though Wright first presented his idea for the newly born suburbia in his 1932 book The Disappearing City, it wasn’t until decades later that his futuristic gas station came to fruition. In 1952, Wright was commissioned to design and build a house known as Mäntylä for Ray W. Lindholm, the president of Lindholm Oil Company, a petroleum distributor headquartered in Cloquet with several gas stations in Minnesota. Having not yet given up on his vision of a decentralized American urban landscape, the architect later approached his former client with the idea of building a service station in Cloquet. In 1956, Lindholm commissioned Wright to construct the gas station. It opened two years later.

Wright’s original design for the station featured overhead gas lines, but traditional ground-based pumps ended up being installed in order to comply with local safety regulations. (Coincidentally, hanging pumps eventually became popular features of gas stations in Japan.) The cement-block building has a cantilevered copper roof and a glass observation lounge above the service area. There’s also a four-car repair area with skylights.

In 1985, the Lindholm Service Station was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Wright-designed site is thought to have influenced the development of gas station architecture in the United States. And, though the renowned architect’s larger plans for Broadacre City never happened, Wright’s gas station of the future is still in operation in Cloquet today.

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