The petrol station is the branded building par ex cellence, though it is hard to see quite why.
The comparison between the petrol station and the parish church is perhaps far-fetched.
Of course, a petrol station, a fast-food outlet and a budget hotel do not make a community.
The modern petrol station is not a single building but a non-hierarchical collection of separate objects.
The main occupations are : drivers, tractor drivers, petrol station workers, irrigation workers (men and women), weeders (men and women), gardeners and loaders.
At the heart of the cluster, like a parish church in a country village, stands the petrol station.
From an architectural point of view, it isn't the branding itself that makes the petrol station interesting, but the standardization of form and building technology that branding encourages.
The petrol station has become a settled vernacular building type and it has achieved this not through invention or original design but through a gradual process of evolution.
