by Russell Boniface
Associate Editor

Summary: An exhibit chronicling the history and future of the parking garage called House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage will open October 17 at the National Building Museum and run through July 11, 2010. The exhibition features photographs, drawings, models, art, artifacts, and videos to showcase the evolution of the parking garage, from the 1920s to today, as well as future parking garage possibilities.

The Euclid Square Garage in Cleveland proclaimed itself the “Largest Garage in the World” on this 1920s postcard. Photo courtesy of the Walter Leedy Postcard Collection, Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library.

House of Cars explores how the built environment has evolved to accommodate automobiles. The concept for the exhibition was brought to the museum by Shannon Sanders McDonald, AIA, author of The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form. The presenting sponsor of House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage is the National Parking Association.

Bill Payne Garage and Storage, circa 1936. Many early garages offered automobile servicing, such as brake repairs, as well as storage space. Photo courtesy Anaheim Public Library.

The exhibit tells the story of how parking garages were created to solve parking problems and evolved from ornate, enclosed structures to today’s open deck and integrated forms. To tell the story, the exhibition brings together from various eras photographs and renderings; artifacts such as garage façades, parking attendant hats, receipts, tokens, and a 1930s parking meter; and drawings from famous architects. There are also models of garages and ramps, and a gallery of fine art showcasing the parking garage in popular culture that features a 15-minute movie of parking garage scenes in film and TV. The exhibit also looks at sustainable garages and parking garages of the future.

Crickelwood Apartments Garage. Steel has often been used in garage construction to reinforce concrete, but with coatings to protect against corrosion, it may also be used on its own. Photo by AISC Regional Engineer William L. Pascoli, PE.

Leavitt explains that once enough people were driving downtown, there needed to be somewhere to store cars. “The infrastructure built for horses wasn’t big enough to accommodate cars,” she says. “By the ‘20s there were thousands of cars. We had to build bigger structures to accommodate cars. There were more cars in America than anywhere else. In some ways it is a worldwide story, but in many ways it is an American story.” Using footage from historical news reels, film curator Deborah Sorensen developed a 15-minute movie about the early days of the parking garage.

City Minit Park, Alliance, Ohio. This 1950s municipal garage used an automated hoist system to lift cars into their spaces. Photo courtesy the Cleveland Press Collection, Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library.

Hoists, ramps, and underground parking
The gallery called “How Does it Work?” is about parking garage engineering and illustrates hoist systems and ramp systems in early garages. There are architectural plans, models, and patents. “In the 1950s there was an uptick in creating new ways to get the cars up,” Leavitt says. ”Many companies experimented with elevated systems. A hoist system can help in a tight urban location, and that is one reason people are looking at them now.” Visitors will be able to test out a ramp system. There are also examples of the first underground garages. “We look at underground garages and their differences,” Leavitt says. “Today, these save real estate, and there is conventional wisdom that garages can’t be more than eight floors high because people can’t stand to go around in a circle more than eight times. If you go down, you can buy extra floors.”

Marina City, Chicago, 1959-67. The Marina City towers in Chicago each has a spiral parking ramp on its first 19 floors and residential apartments above. The complex is often called a “city within a city.” R. Radic photographer, c. 1960s; Bertrand Goldberg Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Parking garages built for saving downtown
“The Mid-Century Garage” gallery examines the parking garage building boom in the 1950s. “There are some great stories of downtown business leaders really counting on parking to save the downtown,” Leavitt explains. ”The big advantage that the suburbs had was plenty of space to park, so the downtown business leaders were really focused on parking in that period.” There are examples of mid-century films in which parking was promoted as the key to urban development. There is also a leasing brochure for a park-at-your desk building in Washington, D.C. Such design did come to fruition. “The concept was that the interior core had the parking, and from each floor you go directly out of the parking floor into the office space. You were never more than 150 feet from your desk,” Leavit says.

Packard Drive Parking Structure staircase, Arizona State University, 2004. This spiral staircase in a parking garage at Arizona State University mimics the motion of cars on ramps as it leads pedestrians through the space. Photo by Tom Story. Photo © Arizona State University.

Art, sculpture, Seinfeld
“Art and the Public Imagination” looks at the parking garage in popular culture and includes examples in fine art, sculpture, paintings, film, and television. A video presentation compiled by Sorenson shows well-known parking garage scenes from film and television. Scenes include the popular Seinfeld episode where the characters get lost in a parking garage, All the President’s Men, Tokyo Drift, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and various spy and thriller movies. “There are a lot of chase scenes, and scenes where the car drives off the parking garage into the city,” Leavitt notes.

Starchitects find a place to park
The “Art and Architecture” gallery looks at parking garage designs by I.M. Pei, FAIA; Frank Lloyd Wright; Paul Rudolph; Santiago Calatrava, FAIA; and Eero Saarinen. “In many cases they were designing office buildings that also needed parking,” Leavitt points out. “But Paul Rudolph’s fabulous Temple Street Garage in New Haven, Conn., was a stand-alone project.” The gallery also looks at art on garage façades. “Firms have looked at how to make the garage a better civic partner and less of an eyesore,” Leavitt says.

Revelle Parking Structure Rendering. This futuristic circular garage is planned for the campus of Revelle College at the University of California—San Diego, and will be surrounded by trees. Courtesy of Harry Wolf, FAIA, Wolf Architecture.

What’s next?
“The Future of Parking” looks at the future of the parking garage, including green garages. “We look at ways planners are using parking to fit into the new urbanism,” Leavitt says. She adds that many garages have already received LEED certification by incorporating such features as recycled materials, bike parking, and Zip Cars. “Many people think that putting green and cars together in the same sentence is an oxymoron, so we take a look at that issue.”

Fairfield Multimodal Transportation Center. This parking garage, designed by Stantec Architecture, uses photovoltaic cells and drought-tolerant landscaping, includes 400 parking stalls, bike lockers, telecommuting center, office building, 10 covered bus bays, electric vehicle charging ports, and plans for retail shops. Photo by David Wakely.

Leavitt says that the exhibit encourages visitors to look at what the built infrastructure means and where it is going. “At the end of the show there is a panel with pictures of parking garages on the National Register of Historic Places,” she says. “Many of these buildings from the 1920s are still here. It’s all part of our built environment, which is an interesting thing to think about. And then, looking forward to what comes next. Is this something we should be thinking about in terms of how to fit parking in with our cities in better ways?”

ZipCar Dispenser proposal, 2004. Moskow Linn Architects proposed this “Pez-dispenser” design for a Zipcar garage, which takes up only a small footprint and literally dispenses cars mechanically. Photo courtesy Moskow Linn Architects Inc.