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IN THE TURNING CIRCLE OF THE CAR
THE AUTOMOBILE CENTURY IN ARCHITECTURE
Previous page: two early car designs by architects: Le Corbusier’s vision of
a small car (in magenta) and Richard Buckminster Fuller’s ”Dymaxion Car“
(in blue)
Bottom: case study House No. 21 by Pierre Koenig (left) offered an
unhindered view of the homeowner’s car from the dining area. The project
”Roof Road NT“ by Architects (right) provides parking spaces on the roofs of
the residential buildings.
Drawing: NL Architects, Rotterdam
simply stands around doing nothing taking up space,
and quite a bit at that, considering the area needed for
access and exit. Housing, depending on the location and
situation, always offers a choice of above-ground parking,
single-storey garages, semi-submerged parking pallets,
underground garages or multi-storey car parks. The
owners of single-family homes usually opt for garages or
open carports. In Europe, however, the latter is still less
appealing. In contrast, however, nearly all the houses of
the Case Study House Program that during the 1950s in
the USA produced a fascinating series of experimental
houses, included carports. But such a close relationship
with the parked car, as emerged in the Case Study House
No. 21 by Pierre Koenig in 1958, where thanks to ceilinghigh
windows the car could be viewed from the dining
area, was rarely found here. When garages need to be
incorporated into terrace houses, it gets more difficult.
Due to their lack of width, almost half the ground floor
space is lost in the process. With the ”Drive-in Woningen“
in Amsterdam designed by Mart Stam in 1937, simply a
”garden room“ remained. A separate flight of steps had
to be assigned to the first upper floor in order to gain
direct access to the garden. With the planning of housing
estates, the question arises as to how great the distance
from the parking space to the house can be in order to still
be acceptable to the residents. Generally, the planner can
offer the choice of either peripheral collective car parks
or garages which are more or less a fair distance away
from all houses, or he decides in favour of allowing the
cars to drive into the complex and must then incorporate
parking facilities in the houses or in the vicinity. In both
cases paved roads to the houses are necessary to provide
access to the fire service.
The car as a design-determining factor
A way out of the dilemma appears to have been found in
the Roof Road NT project developed since 2001 by
NL Architects. As already implemented previously with
Le Corbusier’s urban planning projects for Algiers and
a study from England of the 1960s by G.A. Jellicoe with
the meaningful title ”Motopia“, also in this terrace house
layout the road and parking spaces are sited on the roof.
As a result, up to one third of the overall space can be
saved. Simply the necessary ramps are added to the builtup
area. The open space gained can be put to any use
required. In densely built-up cities, this is a much more
difficult issue. Most city administration authorities have
issued building codes which stipulate at least one parking
space per apartment for new buildings. In the majority
of cases inner-city locations make underground garages
underneath the building unavoidable. It is then down to
the skill of the planner to coordinate the constructional
requirements of both uses. In 1987 Jean Nouvel solved
this problem with his radical Nemausus Housing Project
in Nimes by placing the buildings on supports and thereby
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