Parkings at the End of the Automobile Era

Data, DATA Architectes, Densities, Formats, High Density, Territory and mobility, Topics, Urban Paradigms

Adaptive reuse, Architecture, Architecture’s challenge, automobile, Building, Built environment, Carbon-neutral, City, City living, Construction, Data, Efficiency, France, Functionality, History, Paris, Potential, Refitting Places, Residential, Structure, Territory&Mobility, Urban Paradigms, Vacancy

Excerpt from the exhibition "Immeubles pour Automobiles", comissioned by DATA architectes, held in Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris 2018

In the golden age of Parisian garages between the wars, after the Glorious Thirties, came the era of mass parking areas built to accompany the democratization of the automobile. The archetype evolved towards a form of architectural and urban structure that was rationalized to the extreme, elementary, technically and economically optimized, potentially repetitive and duplicable to infinity. Like factories, supermarkets or warehouses, parking structures were a standardized built figure centered on a single function – in this case to park motorized vehicles.