Western stores did the same thing: They were bigger and taller than the interiors they fronted to communicate the store's importance and to enhance the quality and unity of the street. But false fronts are of the order and scale of Main Street. From the desert town on the highway in the West of today, we can learn new and vivid lessons about an impure architecture of communication. The little low buildings, gray-brown like the desert, separate and recede from the street that is now the high¬way, their false fronts disengaged and turned perpendicular to the high¬way as big, high signs. If you take the signs away, there is no place. The desert town is intensified communication along the highway