Most people think of parking garages as ugly behemoths that perform a necessary evil, but one author and architect has a different way of looking at them.
"'A car park is a kind of gothic space, a dark space, it's like the dark scenes in films in which you're scared not because you should be scared but because you don't quite know what's coming,' says Simon Henley who writes of their 'mysterious inhumane beauty' in 'The Architecture of Parking.'"
"The fact that garages tend to be commissioned by promoters keen only on optimizing parking space can even be considered a plus, Henley says: 'The beauty is that economics mean you pay less attention to people being in them than to parking cars in them. We forget that we have to go into them, the beauty is in this slightly forgotten dimension of experience.'"
"Henley's own practice, Buschow Henley, is working on parking projects from Moscow to Dublin and his degree project in 1989 was a garage which he chose to make corset-shaped, with ramps like laces. The argument of his book is that good architecture (as well as crime) is committed in parking spaces."
Read the full story: Simon Henley in "The Architecture of Parking," finds beauty in dark garages
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