American Culture & Architectural History

The Roadside America Archive: How One Photographer Saved the Buildings Nobody Loved

For four decades John Margolies ignored the skylines of big cities and instead photographed motels, diners, service stations and drive-ins. The result — over 11,700 freely available images held by the Library of Congress — is the most complete record we have of how ordinary Americans actually built the places they used.

• Between the 1970s and 2016, Margolies (1940–2016) photographed roadside architecture across the United States, amassing more than 11,700 images of motels, restaurants, gas stations and odd-shaped landmarks.
• In 2017 the Library of Congress acquired and digitised the collection and released it into the public domain, so anyone can download, reuse or remix the photos for art, teaching, books or simply a road trip.
• The archive is valuable precisely because of what it excludes: Margolies deliberately skipped the monuments and skyscrapers that architects normally celebrate, turning instead to the unloved, throwaway buildings that define everyday American life.

Most architectural history is written from the top down. It is a record of the buildings people were supposed to admire — cathedrals, civic centers, corporate headquarters — designed by famous architects and commemorated in textbooks. John Margolies chose the opposite view. Driving through the Midwest and the South, he pulled over at the motel with the neon arrow, the diner painted like a banana, the gas station topped with a giant soda bottle. These were buildings designed to be noticed for one second and then forgotten, and Margolies spent his career doing the opposite: stopping to look.

The archive captures a form of architecture that has no architect at all. Roadside buildings are built by realtors, franchisors and small-town contractors responding to a single brief — make a driver slow down. That brief produced a visual language of literal sculpture: buildings shaped like food, cars and animals, painted bright colours, lit by neon. Much of it is gone now, replaced by chain hotels and strip malls that look identical on every highway. Margolies' photos are therefore not just nostalgia; they are documentary evidence of a vanishing mode of American self-expression.

Releasing the collection into the public domain was the final, fitting stroke. Public-domain photographs become raw material for new creators — historians use them as primary sources, designers crop them into prints, filmmakers mine them for backgrounds, and AI projects can legitimately train on them. An archive of throwaway buildings, given away freely by the Library of Congress, is in the end its own kind of roadside monument: you do not have to plan a trip to see it, but once you do, it stays with you.