"What's a nice architectural historian like you doing in a truck stop like this?”

Abstract

Along almost every interstate highway off-ramp are the much-maligned places where the everyday rituals of the road are practiced. The truck stop is an integral part of this American scene; yet its mystique is distinct from other vernaculars of roadside architecture, for the expansive domain of the truck stop is a hybrid place that straddles the borders between a protected private precinct and a contested public realm. This paper investigates the socio-spatial order of the truck stop, by engaging interdisciplinary frameworks of the history of architecture and cultural studies, including the theories of Michael Foucault, Edward Soja, and Henry Lefebvre concerning the production and socialization of space. In addition, the study employs a phenomenological inquiry based on the author's experiences in the long-haul trucking industry. This research argues that the truck stop, both a spatial "in between” and a point of destination in the cultural landscape of the highway, is not a neutral local in which social relations unfold. Instead, it operates as a spatio-temporal structure that materially constitutes and makes concrete the social actions, relationships, and ordinary practices of the road.