Car parks are architectural scum, lower down architecture’s evolutionary scale than Travelodges. If your nearest NCP was demolished you’d no more bat an eyelid than if you’d stood on a cockroach.
Their image has remained the same for decades. Dourly grey, usually glowering, crepuscular even in the height of summer; urine-stained, worse, urine-smelling; made of concrete, worse, rough concrete; barely maintained, barely lit, barely human, car parks look as if they’d hurt you. Bad things happen in car parks.
Sounds like just the job for Rem Koolhaas, who likes nothing better than a bit of Modernist dystopia to turn on its head. In theory, with all those spirals, all that concrete, a car park should be a gift for an architect. Koolhaas has been busy regenerating Almere, a faded Dutch Alphaville from the 1950s, though not for the trim, cappuccino-sipping bike riders that give most modern urban planners wet dreams. Koolhaas is rebuilding his new new town around that great modern evil: the car.
Almere’s town centre is constructed around our most unpolitically correct desires — one great multistorey car park, with shops on top. Only — and here’s the point — nice- looking. Indeed so heroic is his vast new car park that its forest of columns has been likened to Cordoba’s great mosque. But for the shoppers it’s just a nice place where you don’t feel you’re going to be murdered — high-tech, opening on to the city ’s lake and sliced here and there with bright tree and shop-filled courtyards. This is a car park, says Koolhaas, “not to endure, but perhaps to linger in”.
Koolhaas has been invested with the spirit of Louis Kahn. Kahn, as well as being one of the greatest postwar architects in the world, invented the modern car park. He was the first really to think about it as a separate building in its own right, and as civic, democratic architecture, as worthy of attention — yours and architects’ — as a town hall or a stately home.
Until the 1950s the car had edged, with some Toad-like brusqueness, into cities built for the pony and trap. The first multistorey car parks, in the 1920s and 1930s, were modest, genteel affairs, slotted in and looking like any other building — pitched roofs, elegant classical/Art Deco façades, many with chauffeurs’ rest rooms and, I’m sure, martini bars. They were mostly built for a small and rich car-owning class. Kahn, though, had read his Le Corbusier and had watched America’s car ownership balloon.
When he designed the civic centre of Philadelphia, his wall of freeways and castle-like car parks, from where citizens would walk into the protected centre, was to protect Philadelphia from the marauding automobile.
Britain’s postwar planners caught the Kahn bug, using the Blitz as an excuse to refit cities for the car, but our attempt at car culture was inevitably less “born to be wild” than America’s. They got sexy freeways, we got the ring road slammed through our cities. Our car parks, with some heroic exceptions, were more Mondeo than Mayan — wilderness spaces designed to store machines in. Why would anyone spend architecture on that?
But Kahn’s problem hasn’t gone away. We drive cars as never before. Our cities, for all the “destruction” of the 1960s, are still poorly equipped for this reality. Short of a trillion pounds being invested in our public transport system, cars and car parks are always, at the very least, going to be a part of our city. So why not make them, as Kahn suggested, proper architecture.
It doesn’t take much to yank architectural scum into just-about-humane. In Dublin and Glasgow two beasts from the 1960s have been made over by Cullen Payne and MCM Architects respectively: the structure remains the same, but inside and out they’ve been refitted in cool, contemporary modern steel, stone and larch. It’s hardly the sublime. It’s just about slotting car parks genteelly into the urban landscape.
Herzog & de Meuron buried their vast concrete car park for the Allianz Stadium, Munich, under an undulating landscape to protect the green belt, though cut with fissures with giant fans to get light in and fumes out, the architecture allowed to shoot heavenwards in dizzying, Piranesian layers and spirals.
In Leipzig Hentrich-Petschnigg & Partner’s new car park opposite the zoo has been built with classic car-park curves and clad in bamboo. It’s simple but astonishing, instantly turning the brutal into zen.
But top marks go to the splendidly ridiculous Hotel Puerta América in Madrid, where each floor has been designed by a different architect-superstar. Teresa Sapey, the least superstar of the lot, ended up with the basement car park. “I’ve always been attracted to forgotten-about spaces,” she says, gamely. “There’s a lot to get excited about in a garage. This is where we get out of our car-bubbles and have to re-engage with the social world.”
And, indeed, she’s transformed it with graphics, colours, crazy lighting and giant prints like a nightclub. As she says: “The ugly frog became a beautiful, sexy princess!”
Baby, you can park my car: sexy British car parks
The Treaty Car Park, Gateshead
Owen Luder’s statuesque gem is known as “the Get Carter car park” for its starring role in Mike Hodges’s 1971 film.
Avenue de Chartres Car Park, Chichester
In 1991 Birds Portchmouth Russum reinvented Kahn’s idea of a car park like a castellated walled city to bring this walled city into the postmodern age.
Rupert Street Car Park, Bristol
A loop-the-loop, inspired by the 1920s “futurist” Fiat factory in Turin with its continuous spiral erupting on to the roof with a racetrack. Imagine being in it alone. In a Ferrari.
Brewer Street Car Park, Soho, London
Built in 1929 by J. J. Joass, architect of Whiteleys, Bayswater, for an Art Deco age. This is one of three listed in London (including the old Daimler garage in Bloomsbury and what is now Conran’s Bluebird empire in Chelsea), had a room for chauffeurs and a ladies’ changing room.
Charles Cross Car Park, Plymouth
Another postwar ringroad classic, best viewed at 30mph or from above, where its abstract D-shaped spiral and internal kiss-curl — opposite a blitzed church too — comes close to Kahn’s idea of the car park as a gateway to the modern city.
