Rehabilitating The Hated Car Park

“Car parks are architectural scum, lower down architecture’s evolutionary scale than Travelodges. If your nearest [parking garage] was demolished you’d no more bat an eyelid than if you’d stood on a cockroach… Sounds like just the job for Rem Koolhaas, who likes nothing better than a bit of Modernist dystopia to turn on its head. In theory, with all those spirals, all that concrete, a car park should be a gift for an architect. Koolhaas has been busy regenerating Almere, a faded Dutch Alphaville from the 1950s, though not for the trim, cappuccino-sipping bike riders that give most modern urban planners wet dreams. Koolhaas is rebuilding his new new town around that great modern evil: the car.”