Architecture and Cars
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- Опубліковано 6 вер 2024
- An architecture professor discusses how buildings, architects, and automobiles have a symbiotic relationship with one another. Cars designed by architects, buildings that look like cars, and buildings designed for cars all make the list as we explore what each has to teach us about the built environment.
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University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture: arch.uic.edu/
I wish parking garages took more account of the people walking to their cars and back. Whenever you walk through a garage to your car it's so awkward, kind of furtive and transgressive, as if you're the only person who ever needs to do that.
Great description
The Michigan Theatre is a super interesting case, drive-in movies have become popular due to the pandemic, this would be the perfect place for drive in plays.
I think the actors would hate it because of the fumes
Another great talk. Interesting to contrast with Tom Vanderbilt's book "Traffic. Why we drive the way we do and what it says about us". He is saying that cars and the environment built for them alter our perceptions. Motorways make it seem like we are going slower than we are. In my culture centric view cars are just the same as buildings, only they move. I think Villa Savoye also very interesting in how Le Courbusier hid the cars underneath (maybe he didn't want the competition) while a few Japanese architects give cars pride of place in or seen from the living room. What will happen when we call up self driving cars when we need them? Rent not buy. Cars and roads are a very big topic in the architectural world. Excellent.
I kept thinking about the 1111 Lincoln Road garage, and sure enough, you brought it up. The first time I was in Miami, we were driving at night. We saw the garage from far away and I literally said "What is that?" It's a very impressive looking structure. I thought it was still under construction, until we got closer and I noticed a few cars parked in it. You must see this place in person. It'll be an experience you won't forget!
I'd love to see more presentations done by just moving thru rhino, the architecture equivalent of a Jon Bois video
Very interesting (as are all of your posts)
I would challenge you to flip the topic and examine architectural elements that were incorporated in automotive design. Starting with the obvious classical Rolls Royce, moving to the Art Deco movement, examining the International School influences (60’s slab side Lincoln Continental perhaps?)
Would love to see a video on cars that mimic, or resemble architecture, Some of the "ugliest" car designs hated by critics would seem sensible from the perspective of architectural design. The 1970 Garmisch coupe from BMW was almost brutalist in its styling, while a few other notable examples from Citroen, Renault and Nissan also show the designer's interest in architecture as well.
I worked on the firm that did the structural work for the Miami Museum Garage and 1111 Lincoln. Great Presentation. There is a great book called The Architecture of Parking, it's a must-have for anyone's architectural library!
Great video as always. Frank Lloyd Wright also had an influence on cars and architecture. He introduced and coined the phrase “car port”.
He also found his signature Cherokee Red from the Crosley automobile company.
The use of the Rhino rendering window for your broadcasting feed is so cheeky and appreciated. Fun stuff!
Your videos really make me want to pursue a degree in architecture!
Great!
or wish I had.
years ago i was thinking about the relationship between car design and architecture so it is very cool to see a video exploring this very subject!
French pronunciation for Americans: "le" (masc.) is similar to the sound in "look"; "la" (fem.) is similar to the sound in "lot"; "les" (plural) is identical to "lay".
Noted.
Actually an architect did design a desirable car: When Bugatti had their first rebirth in the 90s, they clashed with the eccentric designer Marcello Gandini over the EB110 supercar, and so the design was left up to Giampaolo Benedini, the man who had designed the new factory in Italy.
A lasting impression of my studies was how early modernist works often used the car as prop...a symbol of the new age.. But those cars looked positively primitive next to the architecture... Look at the original photos of Villa Stein or the Weissenhof Siedlung. Turn the clock forward to now, the architecture stayed the same but the cars evolved.
Good point. Cars certainly evolve quicker than architecture.
nice, could also look at Lingotto car factory in Turin - which became obsolete very soon after it was completed - mass production with ramps at both ends and a test track on the roof
Really love your videos! They are very engaging and every single one is interesting to watch. There is a lot to learn from them.
I'm a high school freshman from Japan who wants to become an architect. You are truly an inspiration.
With this video quality, you can be sure to it big soon! (I'm binge-watching your entire catalogue right now. )
Glad you’re enjoying it! Hope you have a long career as an architect.
The Dymaxion seems to show an imperfect knowledge of how cars work. 3 wheels is inherently less stable and a rear wheel steering would also make the car less stable, especially at speed. I would think the thing would also have a massive tendency to oversteer and, combined with the single wheel, increase the instability even further.
Bucky designed the car actually as the first stage of an omni-medium transport vehicle, so in many ways, it is situated somewhere between car and plane. and while it was not perfected all the way, it did have some intriguing aspects like the capability of turning on the spot which would tremendously alter the mobility and hence the interaction with the environment. it was never meant to be a car, though, and it did have some flaws in that regard.
My Master's project was about bridging the gap between fine grain architecture and the continuity of the flow of cars. I used Grasshopper and Rhino to create architecture that reconciled historical buildings with a highway by using road geometry. It coexisted with a bus terminus and highway while creating a pedestrian flow from one node in the city to another. It sort of glamourised the car by learning from its geometry and allowing everyday cars to be functional without stinting the qualitative aspect of the pedestrian flow.
A major impact of the car on architecture, is how suburban office park buildings are designed (or attempted to be) to look good or striking as seen from a car driving at high speed on the highway. It often results in slightly Mannerist proportions.
Yeah, this became a much bigger and broader topic than I anticipated when I started. I thought it could be a survey but this will definitely need to be a multi-video series.
Excellent presentation. In our work we love the car for helping to convey scale, and life and most importantly cars are cool. Would love a presentation on Architects and their cars - great work Stewart - cheers from Brisbane
While Le Corbusier's concept is remarkably prescient of the Citroën 2CV, Frank Lloyd Wright's concept for cars in his Broadacre City project is absolutely hilarious! BTW, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car concept prototype did no worst in a crash than other vehicles of its 1930s era. [The Dymaxion is NOT a 'rear-engine' layout [engine behind the rear wheels as with a Porsche 911/912] but a 'mid-engine' one [engine forward of the rear wheel(s) as seen in the Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale and the several concepts built by Italian Carrozzeria on its platform].
P.S. If one is searching for a car with a futuristic look one need only look at any Citroën from a DS19 through the C6.
I love the Buick Century Cruiser car. They need to bring her back into production. The modern ones will be electric and have airless tires.
I remember parking at Marina City, at night, not long after getting my license in the very early 1980s. I still have nightmares of that extremely tight turning radius and the feeling that I was going to back right into the Chicago river.
Sorry not to see the Lingotto Fiat Factory mentioned in this video. A classic car building with a test track on the roof.
And Volkswagen’s Autostadt in Wolfsburg by HENN Architekten, should be in here too.
Stewart, I love your videos and totally appreciate your insights into the world of architecture. Having said that I want to share a true nitpick... In this video you introduce a car designed by Le Corbusier and you pronounce the name of the eminent architect "Lay Corbusier"... a common mispronunciation by folks who are not fluent in French. To a French speaker this sounds like the French word "les" which is used with plural nouns like "les arbres", "the trees". The correct pronunciation of the architect's name is "Le Corbusier" with the first word sounding like "luh", modifying the desiger's masculine surname. Like I said... a complete nitpick. But one that hopefully will endear you to your French speaking audience.
8:55 - I note that all the parked cars in the Marina City cylindrical tower are backed into the spaces instead of facing forward. This is very unusual for the 1960s, since vehicles did not have back-up cameras then to make this maneuver easier. That means this was done intentionally, because this is a staged publicity photo from before the building was actually open. Certainly the MG at the top was intentionally positioned in an open space with no other cars obscuring it.
Thanks for taking the time to make those videos. I just love learning more and more about architecture and design. I remember how grueling school was but I'll be honest sometimes I miss it, and its nice that I have you to watch and learn. Righteous mustache too! Subbed.
One note: I'd read up on sensitive terms like p*rn to be wary of on youtube. The algorithm can be a b*tch sometimes!
You should do a video about the Futurama 2 World Fair ride and do a video about Walt’s Epcot City Hotel. I hope that someone will build that hotel someday.
I just stumbled on this. A vast number of people have pointed out how car-centric America is, so I appreciate your weighing in on this. Please do more on this topic.🙂
5:29 - The dangerously unprotected position of the driver of a Dymaxion car was, first of all, not considered at all in the 1930s, when automobile safety was mostly an afterthought if it was addressed at all. Furthermore, Fuller intended the other seats inside the Dymaxion to be loose furniture which could be arranged as though this was an unmoving room in a structure - a crazy idea even then. But the Dymaxion's overall concept was in fact turned into real vehicles like the Volkswagen van, which was manufactured starting in the late 1940s. This was simply a rectangular box on four wheels, with maximized carrying capacity as well as the potential use as a living space. But...it was just as dangerous for the driver, if not even more so, because there was virtually nothing protective at all for anyone in the front. A friend of one of my brothers crashed a VW van into a pole in the early 1960s and significantly injured one or both of his legs.
Omg I love your channel. I went to SAIC and took many architecture classes because I just love the history of it. I’m not an architect or historian or anything I studied graphic design but architecture is always on my mind. It’s nice seeing a Chicago centric view so it all feels familiar (coincidentally I’m from NY though! Lol great architecture too)
It feels like I am watching my teachers again, architecture is as much of a story as a thing that houses us or accommodates our needs. You’re a great teacher and I feel like I am cheating because these are some great lessons and insights so thank you so much!
I love Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion Car. It was just so "out there".
I love that you use rhino, no one uses it on youtube. It's what I did my design senior thesis in, I designed 3 cars and created all the marketing like I created a full company and did fake cost break downs.
I have been using the parking garage in Chicago for years and have even stayed at air a/b and never realized it looked like that.
i've searched for a topic on this for years ... thanks !
Turning infrastructure into multi-usable structures is probably one of my favorite aspects of architecture.
The 3D graphic of Marina City called to mind, at least initially, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur (with their tops cut off).
I rarely pay attention to parking garages because I don't drive; this was an eye-opener.
3:06 Ironically the grill looks like the pantheon 🏛 architecture > motoring > architecture. But I’m sure that was the point 😄
A great book for this video is "The Architecture of Parking" by Simon Henley
Great suggestion, thanks!
Architecture and cars - great topic also Merry Christmas :)
Awesome! Reminds me of Iain Borden's book
After watching this you need to collaborate with "not just bikes" and have a debate about parking garages and what is good and bad.
Just discovered this channel and I love it
Glad you're enjoying it!
RIP Welbeck Street car park: 1970 - 2019
Haha wow that's awesome! I was so surprised! Great content :)
What program did you use for presenting the info? It looks really nice.
Great video Stewart, very detailed.
If you want you could send me the file you were sharing on your screen and I could post it on my blog, with this video embedded. Hopefully, it might drive your channel more traffic because you genuinely deserve it!
Sure thing!
@@stewarthicks Great! my email is on the channel, but I might need some text alongside the slides if that's okay!
Both La Corbusier's and Fuller's cars seem to show why cars require engineers, working with industrial designers, and not architects. The former's offering is not that revolutionary, Tatra of Czechoslovakia was working on streamlined cars as early as 1927, and the first mass produced streamliner went in to production, by that company, in 1934.
It is interesting you mentioned the Citroen and the Volkswagen Beetle, as the former was partially inspired by the work of Tatra, and the latter was DIRECTLY so, to the point the Nazi occupiers of Czechoslovakia literally took the factory tooling and all the design data back to Germany, and Volkswagen had to quietly pay out Czech auto makers damages after the fall of the wall. So given the obvious cues from those cars, as noted, in La Corbusier's design, I would suspect he too was somehow privy to the work being done by Tatra, and why his design, too, bares such similarities.
The reason Fuller's car, I suspect, is front wheel drive, rear engine, is that at the time, the FR layout, also known as the Panhard layout/design/systeme had become the main format for a car. Until Panhard and Levassor began to focus on that design, and that layout, and in the process set out the basics of car design and operation, there was NO clear format, that proved best, nor even propulsion method. Steam cars, electric cars, and even compressed air cars, all competed with internal combustion. Layouts varied widely, some being front engined, front wheel driven, some being front engine, rear wheel driver, some rear engine, rear wheel drive, etc etc. Controls were the same.
In the 1890s, Panhard came along with their design, and basically began to win everything, they dominated 1890s motor racing. X basic car layout, Y basic control layout, and boom, it demonstrated consistently it was a reliable, and more, effective system. So, slowly, this was adopted by everyone else. Right up until the early 1980s, in fact, information about cars, be it articles, or reviews, or even technical manuals, would often refer to Front/Rear cars as 'Panhard Layout' and everyone knew what that was.
This does not mean it is a better system, but certainly, with the technology available in the 1880s and 1890s, the basicness of the engineering, the 'System Panhard' proved to be the most effective in it's day. So everyone adopted it, literally all the major auto manufactures still around in say the 1910s, basically used this layout.
This meant no one was really using rear/rear, or front/front or mid/rear/front designs. They'd kick off again in the inter-war era. So fuller more than likely did not, as an architect, engineer the entire thing, he probably did not do the actual engine, from concept. He might have even designed the engine, but he'd almost certainly have done so from an understanding based in dominant technology of the time.
Thus I imagine he just got an established, existing, power unit and drive train. For that era in the US, it almost certainly would have been a F/R design, because even by 1933, that was still by far THE most dominant layout for cars. Thus is he wanted the vehicle to be Rear engined, he'd be obliged to make it Front Wheel Drive, by simply installing said preexisting system in the chassis in reverse. Obviously you have to reverse the drive, then, and maybe mess about with gearing/box, but that is not as hard, as designing a whole new engine, driving the rear wheels with whole new design for the drive system, and gearbox, etc etc.
I could be wrong, but I would be pretty sure that is why his car had that layout. He just installed an existing system backwards, and somehow reversed the drive, to work in that manner.
I am sure he had his reasons, but hanging that much forward of the front axels, is pretty nuts, and it would have been a terrible terrible car, so probably fortunate he did not manage to put them in to production.
I like your car knowledge bud
Thank you for not bashing cars.
Fun Fact: Another "feature" of Levittown was racism. Even the FHA* colluded with the builder to make it segregated.
Although, that was hardly innovative.
*Federal Housing Authority
What about the famous Marina City bowling alley... Spencer's Marina City Bowl;)
Very interesting!
Glad you think so!
Please go further/deeper, into this subject 😃 (Transport Designer, here)
Hi Mr hicks, I'm a friend of Jimenez Lai and wanted to say I like your videos very much! Would love to see you talk about some of your work as well!
Thanks for the suggestion! I probably will soon. Testing lots of things out. Stay tuned!
i honestly feel like the entire world is too car centric and that theyre really bad for cities. public transit is the way to go in my opinion.
i mean, look at any street and compare the amount of space cars have and the space pedestrians and cyclists have, cars will almost always own more of the street
Paris Marx's "Road to nowhere" is excellent at discussing this. Agree 100%.
I see you have iRacing on your computer, you really love cars, love to see it.
Haha! Yep!
I wish the US wasn’t built so towards cars at the expense of walking. It’s surprised me, from watching various videos, how bad parts of some cities in the US are planned out if you want to, or need to walk.
More!!!!!
Nice stash
rhino presentation is best
Big miss! Lingotto factory in Torino
1 thing for sure: cars take up a lot of spaces.
no houses made by car designers?
Who the f dislikes a video as this one?!
eyyyy I was here too
At the risk of sounding extremely ignorant: Why is it a desirable quality for a building to look like it's unstable? It's jarring to look at and it makes me uncomfortable.
Carchitechture
A talk titled "Architecture and Cars", but not one mention of urban planning or public transport? No acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding car-centric cities? And you go into detail on parking garages, but no mention at all of auto dealership buildings or other buildings with car-centric features like drive up windows or drive-in theaters?
It's funny how the unitedstater bias towards cars is similar to its blindness to racism. The video fails to mention the great damage that automobile addiction brought to cities all around the world and especially to the US, as much as it ignores that both Levittown and Marina City had a major role in affirming segregation and gentrification.
William J. Levitt refused to sell Levittown homes to people of colour, and the FHA, upon authorising loans for the construction of Levittown, included racial covenants in each deed, making each Levittown a segregated community.
"The more you drive, the less intelligent you are..."
🕳🫀🕳
Is it just me, or is the video a tenth or two of a second behind the audio? Makes it very difficult to watch your face.
You know architects and cars are a good example why you shouldn't engage in utopian thinking. The primacy of cars which architecture and city planners have pushed, killed public transportation, walking and biking in the US which leaned heavily in to them. Leading to more pollution and car accidents and therefore deaths. Architecture has played a part in killing millions of people and causing trillions in damage