As Modernism lost its grip on the collective imagination in the second half of the 20th century, adding a mansard roof to a building must have seemed like an easy way to affix substance and class.
Mansards proliferated, on buildings both residential and commercial. So why not achieve the same sort of upgrade by putting mansards atop signs, which were likely even more in need of classing up? I can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Chicago area our streets were once lined with this oddball expression of 1970s-era mansardism — signs with roofs.
Back in 2003 I published a tribute to this fashion — déclassé suburban even in its prime — which you can read here in a somewhat revised form. Or check out the gallery below that includes more recent scans and photos of both signs and buildings. Mansards are becoming scarcer — the fate of nearly every architectural fashion. But that means they are even more due for revisionist appreciation.
Read my 2003 meditation on mansards, now revised:
I grew up inside a mansard. I am starting to understand.