A01=Martin Treu
Author_Martin Treu
Category=AMX
Category=KCZ
Category=NHK
commercial
drive in
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Main Street
neon sign
open front
pedestrian mall
preservation
restoration
slipcover
storefront
strealine
streetscape
Product details
- ISBN 9781421404943
- Weight: 1361g
- Dimensions: 216 x 279mm
- Publication Date: 25 Dec 2012
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"Signs, Streets, and Storefronts" addresses more than 200 years of signs and place-marking along America's commercial corridors. From small-town squares to Broadway, State Street, and Wilshire Boulevard, Martin Treu follows design developments into the present and explores issues of historic preservation. Treu considers "common" architecture and its place-defining business signs as well as influential high-style design examples by taste-making leaders. Combining advertising and architectural history, the book presents a full picture of the commercial landscape, including design adaptations made for motorists and the migration from Main Street to suburbia. The dynamic between individual businesses and the common good has a major effect on the appearance of our country's Main Streets. Several forces are at work: technological advances, design imagination and the media, corporate propaganda, customer needs, and municipal mandates. Present-day controls have often led to a denuding of traditional commercial corridors. Such reform, Treu argues, has suppressed originality and radically cleared away years of accumulated history based on the taste of a single generation.
A must-read for city planners, town councils, architects, sign designers, concerned citizens, and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America's commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.
Martin Treu is an architect and environmental graphic designer. He is creative director of Treu Design.
