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SCENIC DRIVE

These days, we practically live in our cars. And roadside buildings are finally coming out of the architectural blind spot and becoming spectacular.

Text: CHARLENE ROOKE

1 | 2 | 3 | JUL '04

In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson’s massive RV lumbers off Interstate 80 at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument near Kearney, Neb. It’s a hulking structure, impossible to miss on the perfectly flat stretch of highway. Flanking a log cabin museum are two eight-storey towers, supporting a kilometre-long steel span that’s quaintly wood-panelled to resemble a covered bridge.

It’s not really a bridge or even an overpass. It’s a tourist attraction to lure motorists. But its real significance? This four-year-old colossus was designed to be seen from vehicles going 120 kilometres an hour. It’s carchitecture.

The most interesting carchitecture is not the roadside kitsch of the big goose (Wawa, Ont.) or the UFO landing pad (St. Paul, Alta.). It’s not parkades and gas stations, nor the big-box purgatories of suburbia. "There’s a world of difference between buildings aimed at snaring motorists – like Ikea and McDonald’s – and the single architectural statement that addresses a nearby road as part of its design," says Jonathan Bell, the author of the book Carchitecture: When the Car and the City Collide. Bell defines good carchitecture as "buildings which address their condition with wit and style, rather than descending into mediocrity and pastiche." Yet when I ask him to name some, he flounders.

In fact, we are living in the carchitecture age, an era in which most buildings are designed to be seen and appreciated from moving vehicles. The kitschy drive-ins and awkward strip malls of the past are giving way to contemporary structures that relate to their freewheeling locations in smart, efficient and even beautiful ways. That it’s happening now – at a time when compact hybrid-electric vehicles pull up next to gas-guzzling luxury SUVs – shows that our society’s love-hate relationship with the car is stronger than ever.

IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR

In 1956, driving through the gate of the new Eero Saarinen-designed General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., was like entering the future, a former employee recently recalled in Metropolis magazine. To motorists driving outside Detroit, catching high-speed glimpses of a lollipop tower rising out of a man-made lake or a whirl of building colours like autumn leaves, it provided an early, great example of carchitecture. On the other side of the world, architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa were completing the new Brazilian capital of Brasília, its wide and sometimes sidewalk-free roads a symbol of the world’s first city built for cars.

A very different car culture ruled the day. Cars were originally for the elite, symbolized by "parkways" that enabled escape from the city. The mid-century Merritt Parkway in rural Connecticut was "the most beautiful limited-access highway ever built," says author Bruce Radde in The Merritt Parkway. It featured 68 decorative bridges, and its roadside landscaping was so attractive picnicking had to be prohibited. Radde calls it "a special kind of highway whose design emphasized the pleasure of driving."

1 | 2 | 3 | JUL '04