Motoring Con Brio

We hear this garage is going away, which is too bad. It may not be much to look at now, but it was once considered cutting edge:

With its name spelled in black letters set in yellow blocks that run down the side of the six-story brick-and-glass building, the Kant Garage hardly stands out as a landmark. Yet fans of the modernist style of architecture that marked Weimar-era Berlin flock to the building, on a busy thoroughfare in a western neighborhood, to marvel at design features like the intertwined double-helix ramps, considered revolutionary at the time of the garage’s construction in 1929.

The building’s owners want to tear it down, and they took the first step last month by applying to end its status as a landmark, granted in 1991. Their argument is that the structure is weakening and that repairs would be too costly for the income the garage generates.

So the future of a building that survived Allied bombing during World War II and the postwar push to replace older structures now hangs in the balance of today’s market realities. Germany has 1.3 million recognized memorials, historically protected buildings and sites, many of them considered crucial living testimony to a painful past. But in an age of public austerity, landmarks, too, must pay their way (source).

What other famous parking garages are you aware of? 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami comes to mind, as does Marina City in Chicago.

Image credits: architectuul.com, Wikimedia

~ by velofinds on August 21, 2013.

Posted in Design, Still images, World
Tags: bauhaus, berlin, germany, kant garage, kant-garagen-palast