Photos: Bureau for Open Culture

Drivers delayed by the red light on the corner of East Long and North Washington Streets, in downtown Columbus, Ohio, may hear more than just the hum of idling vehicles. If they crack their windows this winter, they are likely to catch a disembodied voice emanating from a nearby parking lot. “Parking lots,” the voice asserts. “It’s what we are. We should preserve them. They’re cultural property.”

This suggestion arrives courtesy of Audible Dwelling, a temporary installation of two houses designed by Learning Site, a collective made up of Denmark’s Rikke Luther and Sweden’s Cecilia Wendt. The capsule-like structures act like an oversize stereo, amplifying a 15-minute-long narrative—written by the British theorist Jaime Stapleton and read by the Berlin-based artist Cassandra Troyan—loudly enough for anyone in about a three-block radius to catch an excerpt.

To understand why the artists would care to broadcast commentary on parking lots to idling commuters, it helps to have some background on the city’s recent history. Read more…

The parking garage is the Rodney Dangerfield of building types, the troubled snag in the urban fabric, the Gordian Knot of design. But for all the ugly-red-haired-stepchild car parks of the world and the many generic, bunker-like auto warehouses, there are also stunning examples of man-and-machine triumph that incorporate both function and aesthetics. And they are about to be celebrated in an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C.

Based on the book The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form by Shannon Sanders McDonald (Urban Land Institute, 2008), the show highlights the driving designs of such standout architects as Santiago Calatrava, Louis Kahn, and Eric Owen Moss, among others, and plumbs the building type’s history. Originally adapted from the design of stables, early garages offered a similar kind of “curry” service: You could get your car gassed, tuned up, and washed while it was parked. The future of parking brings some of the same, with plans for “smart” garages where you can get your electric car charged inside a building that sports environmentally friendly features like solar panels, green roofs, and (in something of an ecological irony) LEED certification.

If McDonald’s exhaustive tome isn’t enough, you can always check out Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking (Thames & Hudson, 2007), which, in addition to using case studies to discuss design theory, delves into how the auto garage has influenced the designs of such buildings as the Mercedes-Benz Museum by UNStudio, as well as designs by Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Click here for a slide show of noteworthy examples of the form.

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Having trouble viewing the slide show? Continue reading for a single-page version of the story. Read more…