Focusing mainly on European “car parks,” Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking begins with some of the earliest covered parking lots, converted warehouses in cities, such as those seen in 1905 Paris. Next to this, he compares some of the more fantastical designs proposed by emerging “modern” architects who found the parkade an enticing esthetic object. Rather than treat parking as a simple problem of storage, these early designers conceived of parking as intimately connected to the matter of transportation and circulation. Even as late as the 1960s, there were plenty of urban renewal schemes in which the presence of a large parkade would be used to anchor a variety of shops, businesses and, in one case, even a nightclub situated at the top of the parkade elevator shaft.

However, one of the perpetual problems of the car park is its inhuman scale. The most efficient parkades are those designed solely for the dimensions of automobiles, not people. Henley suggests this contributes largely to the “otherworldliness” of the structures. As the modern open-slab parkades began to show their age in the ’70s and ’80s, the weathering caused them to fall victim to blight. Matters were not helped in the ’90s when studies explored the environmental impact of car parks, from the trapping of carbon monoxide, to the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the concrete used in their construction.

In spite of these problems, or perhaps because of the various challenges they present, parking lots have always been a subject of fascination for some of the major figures in modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright adapted the sloping structure for his famed Guggenheim Museum in New York, and current figures, such as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaus, are attempting to redeem the car park as an anchor to a more environmentally friendly transportation hub and multi-use structure. Even famed French thinker Paul Virillio turned to philosophy after getting his start designing parking structures.

As a former parking lot attendant, often experiencing first-hand how ineffective parking design directly led to traffic congestion, Henley’s diagrams and comments on plans offer much insight into how and why these problems occur. He also provides examples of current solutions, such as the 10-mile traffic spiral on the outskirts of Las Vegas that condenses into one tight knot of road in an effort to delay entry onto the Strip. Furthermore, the photo essays documenting the variety of parking structures, from the fantastically high tech to the surprisingly picturesque and simple, contrast starkly to the gravel lots of my youth.