International Harvester’s Cold War retail spaces seemed to make similar promises by ordering or “standardizing” differences and symbolically resolving contradictions and conflicts. Using language reminiscent of scientific research and even space exploration, the company commissioned  Raymond Loewy to design a “prototype” for what it called the dealer’s “Base of Operations.” According to Loewy, the Base of Operations was “designed so as to be fully standardized (modular) and easily expanded or contracted.”  

In the face of ongoing labor conflict in agricultural industries, the standardization of retail spaces helped establish a reassuringly unified and consistent corporate brand. Or as the company’s magazine for dealers, Harvester World, put it in 1948, “the obvious stability and permanence of the base operations store inspires confidence that efficient service is waiting inside the doors.”  

The dealership combined contrasting horizontal and vertical planes: a long white rectangular box with a floor-to-ceiling glass display room topped by a long thin overhanging roof bisected by a red rectangular tower or “pylon” displaying the IH logo. This combination of color-coded vertical and horizontal planes incorporates opposing aesthetic elements to produce what Harvester World calls a “pleasing contrast” that resolves material conflicts formally and thus serves as an apt frame for the labor-saving and disciplining devices displayed inside the redesigned IH showrooms. 

IH advertised the new dealerships as “modern,” “scientific,” “progressive,” and “strides into the future” because of their role in promoting mechanization and labor “saving.” The company thereby converted its retail and service spaces into robots of a sort, machines for selling agricultural mechanization and the dream of replacing recalcitrant farm workers.

This project was implicitly framed in Cold War nationalist terms as part of the technological progress IH promised the world. One story in Harvester World concludes that the red pylon is a “symbol of post-war progress,” with a thousand of the new dealerships built or planned in the US and others built in or planned for Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. In another story titled “Progress in the Desert,” the magazine focused on a base of operations in Syria as “an outpost of Harvester dealer progress.” 

The first prototype built outside the United States, however, was in Hermosillo, Mexico, where, according to a 1946  Harvester World story, “the IH pylon” was “now an international beacon.” As if to visually emphasize the forms of technological progress IH purveys, the first page of the story includes a photo of the dealership’s modern exterior as two men on a burro-drawn cart pass by, while the next page includes an image of the dealership’s interior and three streamlined tractors. This base of operations in Mexico represents a “progressive spirit” because it promises to displace workers. Ironically, the “international” version of the prototype, a design dedicated to eliminating workers from production, opened on May Day, the international celebration of the world workers’ movement.