"In the old Yogi Bear cartoons, Yogi would run by a rock, a bush, and
a tree. Then he'd pass the same rock, same bush, same tree. We've done that
to ourselves with the interstate system," says David Malcolm Rose,
who has spent the last decade making intricate models of the small roadside
businesses that have all but disappeared from the American landscape. (At
right: Cimarron Court, modeled on a motel located between Westville, Oklahoma
and Lincoln, Arkansas on Highway 62.) Employed as an architectural model
maker briefly in the early 1980s, Rose now elaborates on those skills
to capture design idiosyncrasies and decay.
"We've lost the regionalism,"
he says. "In the fifties I had friends that would drive from upstate
New York to Florida and back. They'd tell stories about all the little towns
they went through like they'd been in a foreign country. Now people get
on I-95, and they stop at Shoney's for breakfast and McDonald's for lunch,
and then they stay in a Holiday Inn. The next day you can go to another
Shoney's and have the same breakfast--the same plate with the same two eggs--anywhere
in the country."
