The humble car park is often considered too utilitarian to inspire great architecture, but a few exceptions challenge that notion, writes GEMMA TIPTON
CAN YOU get excited about car parks? Could you wax lyrical about a multi-storey? While car parks might seem, for want of a better adjective, pedestrian, there are some hidden architectural gems out there, and they go largely uncelebrated.
One of the problems is that the aesthetics of car parks get wrapped up in, and confused with, their ethics. So as soon as you start extolling the virtues of a new construction, your delight in its structure and vistas will quickly become clouded by thoughts of carbon footprints, getting cars off the roads and how much better it would be if we had decent cycle lanes and public transport instead.
Over the decades, the car has lost some of its romance and glamour, and, partly as a result, car parks have been driven to lurk on wasteground or hide underground – which means we’re missing some interesting architectural opportunities.
Car parks can be romantic, and dramatic too, and it doesn’t just depend how you feel about cement. The meeting in the car park is a staple scene of gritty cop shows, often because, on the top tier, you’re afforded panoramic views of the city or landscape that are generally unrivalled by all but penthouse apartments and high-level offices.
Meanwhile, you also have the added drama of the wind in your hair and a strangely exciting sense of being outside society, in a sort of social hinterland where the normal rules do not apply. Perhaps not everyone experiences a frisson in a half-empty multi-storey car park at twilight (and not just because of the possibility of being mugged), but I suspect there are more of us than you might imagine.
Car parks have other surprises in store: a car park was the inspiration for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York – he had previously created a similar design for the (clumsily named) Gordon Strong Automobile Objective, in which the spiralling ramps brought cars to the top of the building. A planetarium was to have been housed inside, alongside a restaurant, with car park included as a vital element of the building.
Wright was passionate about cars, and objected to modern parking practices. He wrote to Gordon Strong declaring it shocking to see people driving to their destination, then “leaving the automobiles in which they both now really live and have their beings . . . still ‘parked’ aside, betrayed and abandoned as usual.”
The Gordon Strong Automobile Objective was never built – Strong felt the design interfered with the beauty of its proposed mountain-top setting, an objection to which Wright responded: “I have given you a noble ‘archaic’ sculptured summit for your mountain. I should have diddled it away with platforms and seats and spittoons for expectorating businessmen and the flappers that beset them.”
Wright wasn’t the only one to form a personal relationship with cars, and while I’m pretty unsentimental, I often find myself (especially when in the Dún Laoghaire Shopping Centre multi-storey) picking a parking spot with a view of the sea. I know my car can’t see, but I like to think of it somewhere nice, and definitely not “betrayed and abandoned”. The Architecture of Parking, by Simon Henley, just published in paperback, aims to celebrate car parks in all their glory, and also to inspire the creation of new and more exciting ones for the future. While the specifics of car parks – the exact size of parking bays, the ergonomics of circling cars entering and exiting, ramps, security and the importance of fresh air in such an exhaust-filled environment – are standard, when architects are allowed to be creative, the results can be amazing.
MANY FAMOUS NAMES have tried their hand – one of Frank Gehry’s most noted early buildings was a shopping centre complete with multi-storey car park in Santa Monica, California. Some, however, have been less successful than others: the Zidpark mechanical car park in London, which saw each car driven into a lift and hoisted into its space, was opened in 1961 by Princess Margaret and only worked for a single day before being shut down again. Others, such as Konstantin S Melnikov’s 1925 plans for a dynamically designed multi-storey placed, bridge-like, over the Seine in Paris, never made it off the drawing board.
Early multi-storeys were enclosed spaces: before we knew of the dangers of carbon monoxide to humans, the weather was considered a greater threat to the oil-based paintwork of the cars themselves. But with the opening out of parking levels, some stunning designs were inspired. The Owen Luder Partnership’s Trinity Square shopping centre and multi-storey (1966) in Gateshead was made famous in the Michael Caine movie Get Carter. It is from here that Caine’s character tips developer Cliff Brumby to his death, prompting the architects in the movie to mutter: “I have an awful feeling we are not going to get our fees on this job . . .”
On the top deck, a bricked-up structure was to have been a nightclub, the idea being (in the days when drinking and driving was still considered acceptable) that during the day, people would park on the lower floors for the shops, while at night they would drive up to the top and party within sight of their vehicles. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been delighted, but the nightclub never found a tenant.
If Trinity Square is all brutalist concrete, Tigerman, Fugman, McCurry's Eastlake Street car park in Chicago (1984-86) looks, from the outside, like the front of an old-fashioned automobile, complete with arching tyres as porches over the pedestrian entrances. Then there are the AutoTürme (1994), by Henn Architekten in Wolfsburg, Germany, and Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City in Chicago (1964), which both feature in the recent 1000 Buildings You Must See Before You Die(Octopus, £20, editor Mark Irving).
While the two circular towers of Marina City only leave the bottom third to car parking (the people living in the apartments above get all the best views), the two 20-storey glass and steel towers of the AutoTürme are entirely given over to the automobile – and not to just any automobile, for this is the home of Volkswagen. Up to 1,000 cars a day are delivered to the towers from the nearby factory, then they are hydraulically hoisted into their glass pods, and then lifted down again to greet their new owners.
A RECENT TREND in Europe has been to bury the car parks, once plonked in otherwise historic city squares, beneath the streets, but in my absolute favourite car park of all time, this doesn’t mean hiding everything away like a guilty secret. The Parc Célestins in Lyon, by Michel Targe, Jean-Michel Wilmotte and Daniel Buren (1994), is like a coliseum, buried under the city streets. It is eerie, exciting and strangely beautiful as light and shadow fall through the arches that edge its core.
Demonstrating, once and for all, that the architecture of parking can be fun and inspiring, at the very bottom, a circular mirror, set on an incline, slowly revolves. You don’t see the mirror when you’re parking here, but you do experience the changing light it creates. And even more spectacularly, a periscope in the park above shows you this hidden world below. The Parc de Célestins is part of a larger green transport plan in Lyon that includes bicycle pools, electric buses and recharging points for electric cars, and it shows that cars need to be acknowledged as a key element of the way we live today. I don’t think designing more exciting multi-storeys will prompt more people to drive into our cities any more than I think constructing more drab and dull parking edifices will stop people bringing their cars into town.
On the other hand, if we are ideologically determined to hide our cars away, perhaps we could take a lead from the Dutch: vmx Architects’ Fietsenstalling (2001) is a multi-storey for bicycles, just near Centraal Station – safe, secure and, most importantly, dry cycle parking in the city centre. Now there’s an exciting idea.
The Architecture of Parking, by Simon Henley, is published by Thames Hudson, 2009, £16.95
LUXURY VENUES FOR YOUR VEHICLE
Parkhaus, Saas-Fee, Switzerland (Steinmann Schmid Architekten, 1994-96)
Built into the edge of a cliff, it houses the vehicles of visitors to this car-free ski resort.
Car Park Rotundas, Hamburg Airport, Germany (Von Gerkan, Marg Partner, 1990-2002) Spiralling shapes and lots of light. If Frank Lloyd Wright had got to build his car park, this is what he would have created.
Burda Parkhaus, Offenburg, Germany (Ingenhoven Overdiek Architekten, 2000-02) Proving that car parks don't have to be all concrete and steel, this is clad and shaded by Oregon pine.
PET HATES CAR PARKING GRIPES
Narrow bays:When greedy developers don't give you space to squeeze your car into, or for you to squeeze into your car.
Confusing design:Floors 2, 2a and 2b, plus green, red and blue zones, mean long quests to rediscover your car.
Complicated systems:Make you feel you have driven halfway home before you even get out of the car park.
No views:The best thing about a multi-storey is the view from the top, so please don't close it in.