Frankie Lee - Where do we belong

Twentysix Gasoline Stations - Edward Ruscha

Edward Ruscha, Twentysix Gas Stations, 1962.

A estrada, a estrada

The interstate system is the final stage of American highway development. As the automobile became more prevalent, faster, and ultimately essential to our way of life, the landscape was modified to accommodate this new necessity. The automotive highway was built on paths, tracks, pikes, roads of a horse and pedestrian era. In the early period […] The automobilist was an adventurer challenging territory and terrain. But soon changes came to the road itself […] There was a whole set of accouterments to accommodate the needs and desires of drivers, passengers, automobiles, and the road itself. Any stretch of road came to contain information for orientation, direction, and traffic management. Its signs, lights, and stripes, became second nature. There were places to service the car and to serve the mobile populace. The landscape – urban, suburban, rural, became an automotive one.

Kenneth I. Helpland, “The 1950s and the birth of contemporary landscape”, Places, Volume 5, nº2, pp. 40-49, 1988.

Cá vamos nós!

The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

Robert Frank, 34th Street, 1951.

The Road Not Taken (1915)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I marked the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.