Take a Tour of the Country’s Weirdest Architectural Attractions

The Great American Road Trip has been done before; last year, Atlas Obscura published a detailed history of the first coast-to-coast car trek from California to New York City, 121 years ago. Jack Kerouac made it counterculture. Simon and Garfunkel made it soulful. Architecture critic and curator John Margolies made it iconic: Beginning in 1972, Margolies  traveled off the beaten path to photograph America’s roadside architectural marvels. Beginning in 2005, the Library of Congress acquired his images, making them easily accessible. Now, even if you’re trapped in your office on these long summer days, you can voyage through the country’s smallest towns and weirdest vintage attractions via the thousands of images available for public use.

Margolies held an editorial position at Architectural Record and organized exhibitions with the Architectural League. In 1970, he curated a show of the work of Morris Lapidus, who at the time designed hotels in Florida in the style of what is now considered Miami Modernism. Titled "The Architecture of Joy," the exhibit, as characterized by Ada Louise Huxtable, was "presented as an exercise in mid-American, mid-20th-century popular taste in art and what 90 percent of the American public really likes and wants." She enjoyed such design for its "intimate revelations of the pop mentality" that she called "mind-blowing," but also critiqued the notion that elevating such a style into an "esthetic pantheon" was "intellectual baloney…uninspired superschlock."