Garage Beat

I open up my email Friday morning to find this mid '80s post-modern monstrosity gaping at me from top dead center. It was a review of a new book The Architecture of Parking. Parking garages are not exactly on par with concert halls or art galleries when it comes people's ideas of great design, but there's a great challenge to a design problem with such ruthless demands of function and efficiency. Frankly the cheesy appliqué of the featured building would get a little grating after a few years. If you want to decorate a box just look at the Art Deco City Garage just around the corner from my office, and home to the Satellite Lounge & Diner (ask for Princess).

But if you want to really exploit the advantages to the parking garage design problem then it calls for an embrace of simple geometric forms. This was the approach taken by the mid-century moderns almost to a fault, but I think that it has a great purpose especially for such utilitarian structures. The irony of modern design was that at it's peak, it clashed so much with industrial, particularly automotive, design. The photo I took several years ago of a vehicle and parking ramp of similar vintage typifies that dichotomy. While the building proclaims machine-like clean lines, the tail-fins, chrome and bullet tail-lights of the old Dodge illustrate a positively post-modern love of over-reaching symbolism.

Oh, and I'd pay money to see someone skate that 5-story spiral ramp.