| What Venturi, Brown and Izenour learned from Las Vegas was that America was producing dynamic, auto-oriented built environments replete with cultural symbolism and meaning, and that few architects or scholars of landscape studies were taking these environments seriously. There is still more to be learned from highway landscapes. Twentieth century America's greatest landscape shaper, the automobile, has created highway environments that are cohesive places with evolving identities that can be understood through their material and non-material culture. Pennsylvania's Lincoln Highway, with its deep heritage, strong identity, and diverse settings, provides the perfect laboratory for studying the American roadscape as place. With the help of the ARC/INFO GIS package, the Lincoln Highway's visual landscape was analyzed by surveying the physical characteristics of its roadway segments, and gas, food, and lodging structures. Its non-visual landscape was explored using qualitative techniques. Data gleaned from interviews, participant observations, and public records disclosed the Lincoln Highway's perceived place-identity.; The Postwar years were a critical watershed in the creation of the roadscape's current cultural identity, which is dependent on the influences of metropolitanism. Location-specific regional variations in the Lincoln Highway landscape are minimal compared to differences between metropolitan and non-metropolitan environments. Highway landscapes are the conduits over which a rationalized, urban-based built environment, frequently described as "placeless", is expanding. Beyond the metropolitan fringe, more remote highway landscapes still reflect earlier time periods. Having so far escaped the homogenizing influences of a rapidly expanding national culture, these places are attempting to exploit the postmodern increase in heritage tourism as a way to develop isolated, rural economies. |
