Why parking garages are an important cultural asset

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• Why parking garages are an important cultural asset
• This is the perfect car for finding a parking space
• The car was once a symbol of new beginnings
• Niklas Maak, Art and architecture critic

Why parking garages are an important cultural asset

Editor-in-chief

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Parking space of dreams: the “Marina Towers” ​​parking garage in Chicago is airy with its honeycombs.

Source: Getty Images

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The armored steel shell of the multi-storey car park in Sheffield, UK, is popularly known as the “cheese grater”.

Source: Getty Images

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Inviting: two of the six floors of this car park in Miami have ceiling heights of around 6.80 meters. The top one measures 7.5 meters from floor to ceiling.

Source: Getty Images

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This car park in the center of Melbourne is clad with colored geometric elements.

Source: picture alliance / Reinhard Koes

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Also a multi-storey car park in the broader sense: the award-winning Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart.

Source: Getty Images

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The back of the first high-rise garage in Germany on Kantstrasse in Berlin.

Source: picture alliance / IMAGNO / Austri

Far too little thought is given to the house in which the car lives. Garages are one of the most important places in modern times. The most beautiful is in Berlin, the ugliest in Singapore.

The world: Cold, dark, square, windowless: what’s so nice about a garage?

Niklas Maak: Garages have a bad reputation. Anyone who drives their car into the garage is considered a philistine who is afraid that their car will be stolen, rust or be dented. Cultural critics love to emphasize that something is wrong with a society where the garages are bigger than the bedrooms. The garage is one of the most interesting and important places in modern times. When the car is pulled out, a garage is the most open and empty place in the house. The garage is the house that is not yet filled with furniture and everything can be turned into. Parties can take place in the garage, ten children can spend the night, it can become a workshop. The garage is, so to speak, the most mobile part of the property, the place where important things take their first form – the bungalow garage, for example, in which Steve Jobs screwed together the first Apple computers in the 1970s. That’s why “garage” is also an aesthetic term – there are “garage rock” and “garage punk” that relate to mainstream pop like a garage to the living room: rougher, more open, harder, more improvised, more experimental, more alert, less upholstered and noble wood. And sometimes the garage is also the place where urban life returns to the single-family housing estates. In his book "Magical Urbanism" Mike Davis described how Latin American immigrants in particular, who settled in run-down suburban houses, set up workshops and small shops in the garages, thereby bringing back the lively, dense small-town business structure that was lost with its modern suburbanization went.

The world: Shouldn’t the whole house then be more like a garage?

This is the perfect car for finding a parking space

When entering the parking garage, only one free space is displayed. It’s time to crank and search and hope that the next one doesn’t take your place. That’s not a problem with this car. Source: Zoomin.TV

Niklas Maak: In a way, yes – as a countermovement, so to speak, to this tendency to turn cars into rolling living rooms. A Renault 4 or a Porsche 911 from 1964 were technical devices, there was a lot of metal and a lot of levers that kept the driver awake.

The car was once a symbol of new beginnings

Where in the past the ideal of a confident, active machinist was required with thin steering wheels, skinny gear sticks, cold synthetic leather and a lot of sheet metal, the interior of today’s cars, on the other hand, has a peculiar atmosphere of dim, corner-like comfort: plush armchairs, a thousand buttons, lights, wood veneer – the car, once upon a time The living room now always has a symbol of departure and the promise of an escape from immobilized relationships. It is so comfortable in modern cars that you risk falling asleep while driving – which is why many cars are delivered with drowsiness detectors and jogging seats. That wasn’t necessary in an old 356. The right house for his aesthetic of wakefulness is Pierre Koenig’s Bailey House in Los Angeles.

When the car is part of the designer apartment. The architect and designer Holger Schubert has a dreamlike apartment for himself and his Ferrari 512 Berlinetta Boxer BBi, built in 1984…ng built in Los Angeles

Source: Los Angeles Times / Polaris / laif

The garage is half-open, almost a carport, and is separated only by glass into the living room. From the kitchen and from the bed you can see the car waiting in its shelter like a constant promise of a possible departure – just like the American cowboy of the early days always kept an eye on his horse when he stopped by the campfire. The American bungalow architecture is anyway a kind of abstract evocation of the open, not immobilized, not hopelessly walled-in life that the trappers led and that Hollywood mythologized at the same time in countless westerns: the open fireplace was reminiscent of the campfire, the pool of the potions , the successor to the horse was called Mustang and waited in the garage, which was getting wider and wider and which kept the promise of departure and mobility in the property alive. The garage is the space of the house in which the possibility of another life becomes visible. The break-in room.

"The garage is the house that is not yet filled with furniture and everything can be turned into."

Niklas Maak, Art and architecture critic

The world: What is the most important garage of modern times?

Niklas Maak: Probably the recently listed garage where Steve Jobs built his first computer. The fact that a garage was declared one of the most important monuments in California seems like a wistful reminder of those days when, behind inaccessible, windowless rooms, one had to suspect neither terrorists nor defense or spying efforts of the other side, but a laboratory of the American pioneering spirit.

The most important garage in recent history: In this small garage in Los Altos, California, Steve Jobs and Co. laid the foundation for Apple’s success. The former …Steve Jobs ‘parents’ house and garage have been listed as a historical monument

Source: picture alliance / dpa

The world: There aren’t also very depressing garages?

Niklas Maak: And how. Especially in China. American prefabricated houses are very popular with the Chinese middle class. These houses are automatically delivered with a double garage. This makes the double garage pointless. In the “Orange County China” settlement near Beijing, employees have to move into the garage. But windows are not built into them. The garage residents have no choice but to open a wall, the gate, to ventilate on hot days and so to speak to live on the street.

The world: What is the most tasteless garage?

Niklas Maak: The Hamilton Scott Apartments in Singapore. The cars are lifted up in the “En Suite Sky Garages” of the 30-story house and parked in the apartment. Instead of promising an immediate departure in front of the door, they become furniture or melancholy sculptures – exactly wrong. Elsewhere, architects are thinking about converting parking garages by building small houses in the outdoor parking spaces where there is daylight. That’s a lot more interesting.

The world: The bravest garage?

Niklas Maak: Actually the car park that opened in May 1901 in London’s Picadilly Circus. It was the first multi-storey car park to stretch over seven floors. If the 19th century was the century of horizontal expansion, the century of the railroad and the conquest of the colonies, then the pioneers of the 20th century were heroes of vertical expansion: high-rise builders, rocket engineers, and astronauts. The fact that you could race your car on a ramp towards the sky in a large London garage as early as 1901 was a futuristic anticipation of this change of direction.

The Kant garage in Berlin from 1930 is the oldest preserved multi-storey car park in Europe, a monument of New Building in the Weimar Republic

Source: ullstein picture

The world: And the most beautiful?

Niklas Maak: The most beautiful historical garages are the Kant-Garagen in Berlin from 1930, the oldest preserved multi-storey car park in Europe, a monument of the New Building in the Weimar Republic. One of the architects was Richard Paulick, who was Walter Gropius’ assistant at the Bauhaus and had to flee from the National Socialists in 1933. The fact that this house for 300 cars, which was also a monument to an open, new, future-oriented democratic Germany, is to be demolished for economic reasons despite monument protection after the owners, Pepper Immobilien, let it run down for years, is one of the many unspeakable architectural scandals in Berlin. The most interesting new garage construction is a multi-storey car park in Miami Beach, 1111 Lincoln Road by Herzog de Meuron, an open structure that not only houses 300 parking spaces, but also bars, restaurants and event spaces and palm trees grow. A “multi-storey car park” in the literal sense of the word, a mixture of a vertical park and a house that you can drive through. With a construction cost of 65 million euros, it is probably also the most expensive and decadent parking garage of all time.

Niklas Maak is an architecture critic and car fanatic. He heads the art department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Niklas Maak, Art and architecture critic

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