Alternate Parking Lots
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Drawing Project
October 1990
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Alternative parking lot designs
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This speculative drawing project addresses the parking lot as a ubiquitous site in the American environment. Whether in suburbia or in urban or rural contexts, the parking lot springs less from a place than from the mobility—even restlessness—of the American lifestyle and psyche. In being uniform and in contributing to the uniformity of every environment, parking lots are at the same time everywhere and nowhere specific. A parking lot is a middle ground.
Relevant to architecture and landscape architecture, the car lot is clearly not a building, even though it is spawned by development and provides necessary support for buildings. The car park is also not a landscape in the colloquial sense of the natural landscape or in the eighteenth-century sense of the landscape as that portion of land which can be surveyed in a single view. Planned and constructed to be unobstructed and unintrusive, the typical parking lot is designed, in effect, to be overlooked. Unstudied and spatially indefinite, parking lots are an inescapable part of something fundamental to the American landscape - urban sprawl.
The project accepts the simple functional requirements of dimensions and automobile movement in order to examine the parking lot as more than simply functional.
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Landscapes of the 21st Century Competition Award in 1989
Published in Visionary and Unbuilt Landscapes Competition
Landscape Architecture magazine, 1992
