Paleo Retiree writes:
Calder Loth wants to know: Why are so many of our urban parking structures so damned ugly? Great passage: “These vapid works of naked engineering are little more than concrete shelving to store our vehicles, blaring the fatuous rationale that form follows function.” Calder also shares photos of some all-too-rare parking structures that are genuinely handsome — hey, it can be done. I mused about the way a few good-looking parking structures helped transform Santa Barbara back at my old blog. Attractiveness really does play a role in whether a downtown is appealing or not.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
This is something that really needs to be addressed – why did so many American buildings become willfully ugly after about the late 1960’s? I mean, I know that PR doesn’t like Modernism, but there is a difference between Mies Van Der Rohe and the sort of Brutalist neo-Commie quasi-Fascist junk that started to go up about 1970, let alone a lot of the Starchitect PoMo crap. As the pictures from the old “2Blowhards” blog prove, even a Modernist parking garage can be attractive, or at least not actually ugly. What happened?
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Street level parking garages and parking lots tend to be stroll-killers. You want to walk past shops, not massive expanses of concrete.
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Yeah, it’s kind of creepy, especially at dusk. Real odd vibes.
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One of the better parking-structure ideas anyone’s had is: don’t just make your parking structure attractive and safe, make the ground floor of it a row of shops and restaurants, and put all the parking above that level.
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