Overthrow the autothrone
Description
We have too much parking. The automobile-oriented utopia promised by optimistic modern architects like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright did not come to pass. Personal motor vehicles have indeed become ubiquitous, but the effect in urban environments, at least has been more tyranny than democracy. Cars have taken over the city. Huge areas of urban land are dedicated almost exclusively to cars, and narrow-minded engineer-driven planning continues to widen streets, raise speed limits, and increase parking space, to the detriment of alternate (and by most metrics superior) methods of transportation, or any other potential use of urban space. Additionally, with technological advances allowing car-sharing and the projected explosion of self-driving cars, parking garages are likely soon to become obsolete. We don't have enough housing. As more people move to cities, vulnerable established communities are displaced, property taxes soar, and city footprints balloon. Increased residential density, through both n construction and infill, can assuage these problems while decreasing the necessity of automobile travel. I will begin my research by analyzing the typology of the American parking garage and its relationship to the urban fabric. This analysis will yield a taxonomy of the formal and material components of parking structures. Many components will be challenges to human habitation; a few will be benefits; all will present opportunities for a symbolically and actively revolutionary form of urban housing. From this taxonomy, I will develop a catalog of strategies for responding to these challenges at least to address them and ideally to reframe them as assets. I will test these strategies by applying them to a local parking garage, adapting it as a multifamily housing complex and alternate transportation hub. These strategies could later be enacted city- and nation-wide to transform a mainstay of stubborn car culture into an urban asset.