Richard Longstreth is one of the few historians to focus on ordinary commercial buildings -- buildings usually associated with commercial builders and real estate developers rather than architects and thus generally overlooked by historians of "high" architecture.

Here Longstreth explores the early development of two kinds of retail space that have become ubiquitous in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. One, external, is devoted to the circulation and parking of automobiles on retail premises. Longstreth analyzes the origins of this development in the...