Designing Oil: ARCO, Herbert Bayer, and the Landscape of Petroleum, investigates the work that the architect and designer Herbert Bayer made for the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company (ARCO) from 1966-1985 to understand the diversionary role that his symbolic architecture played in facilitating the golden age of petroleum amid an energy crisis, oil spills, and mounting environmentalist criticism. I connect early architectural and exhibition designs of Herbert Bayer to his work for ARCO and its CEO, nature-lover R.O. Anderson. Anticipating Venturi/Scott-Brown, Bayer saw the built environment as a dynamic representational field, prioritizing image over materiality. The diversionary architecture Bayer created emerged from the “dynamic museum” he developed with Alexander Dorner in the 1940s, and from Bauhaus attempts to integrate architecture with color and typography. His structures were incorporated into literal highway diversions and exploited the dual function of the screen as a visual barrier and alternative viewshed.