I hate multi-storey car-parks

click photo to enlarge
I hate multi-storey car-parks. I always have done and I don't see that viewpoint changing in the future. I know that they offer parking close to shops and the centres of towns and cities, and perhaps if my mobility were to be impaired my view might change. However, I don't think those circumstances would make me love them.

I've long felt that multi-storeys have the character of a building designed to be a slum: everything is pared down to a functional minimum with bare concrete being the main surface on view and, internally at least, no attempt made to embellish the basic internal structural skeleton. The aim of this, as with slums, is to extract the maximum income from the minimum infrastructure. To that end the ramps are always narrower than anyone would wish, the curves always tighter, the scuffs and scratches on the bends marking where drivers have caught their bumpers on the unyielding concrete, and the parking spaces have barely enough room to get out of your car. They have a general ambience akin to a slaughter house, and that's perhaps the reason that a modern "thriller" cliché is the confrontation of the hero and the "baddies" in the dimly lit  floors of the multi-storey car-park.

Today's photograph shows a typically grim, grey prospect highlighted by the primary colours of warning dazzle and signs. Here, unusually in my limited experience of such places, the area reserved for cars is green and that for pedestrians is marked in red. Incidentally, I have seen a number of poor attempts to decorate the outside of a multi-storey car-park, including one that featured pointed arches in a pitiful attempt to "fit in" with the nearby Gothic cathedral. The only one I have seen and liked featured in this blog post.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Multi-Storey Car-Park, Gloucester
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 75mm (150mm - 35mm equiv.) cropped
F No: f5.5
Shutter Speed: 1/160 sec
ISO:640
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

321 Triptych

click photo to enlarge
My blog post on the last day of 2009 featured three photographs presented in the form of a triptych. For anyone who doesn't know, a triptych is either a single picture divided into three parts but joined together or three different pictures joined together. In each case they are presented as a whole. I first came across the term when studying Renaissance painting. Often the reredos of an altar was in the form of a painted triptych of the Crucifixion, Nativity or Annunciation, that could be folded up when the altar wasn't in use. The Victorians made the religious triptych fashionable again, and they are still being produced today in one form or another for secular as well as church purposes.

My first triptych was intensely secular: how else can you describe photographs of the detergent and grease left on the roasting tray as I cleaned it after the Christmas meal? The same can be said of today's photograph(s) - my second foray into the world of the triptych. I'd taken a photograph of the number on a new sign that indicated the floor of a building that I was in. As I ascended the stairs in the stairwell I discovered that a different colour had been used for the walls of each floor. So, with the idea of a triptych in mind I made sure I got a shot of the numbers for the floors of the first, second and third storeys. The glass or plastic that the signs were made from reflected the windows and stairs, and I made sure to include these reflections. What appealed to me about these images was the high gloss and the sharp, clear delineation of the numbers contrasted with the out of focus softness ofthe reflections. The sequence - either ascending or descending - seemed the obvious way to sequence them.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1 (i.e. 3!)
Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 7.9mm (37mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.4
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On 

Reviled buildings and illusions

click photo to enlarge

Are multi-storey car parks the most reviled type of building in our towns and cities? I think there's a strong case for saying that they are lower in the public's estimation than, say, public toilets, petrol stations or burger bars - buildings that are often castigated for their charmless functionality. In fact, it's that utilitarian character that makes multi-storey car parks so unappealing. All that unadorned concrete, oil-stained ramps, battered corners and echoing stairwells seem designed to get you out of the building as quickly as possible once the fat fee has been prised from your pocket.

The examples of awful multi-storeys are almost too numerous for me to mention, but I will cite one that I saw recently in Kingston upon Hull, part of a newish hotel by the river. The car park isn't helped by the architecture of the rest of the building, but the unnecessary curves and grotesque metal grilles are truly bad.

It was that car park (and one in Lincoln that has an exterior theme of pointed arches - a cathedral town, geddit?) that came to mind when I saw the example in the photographs that is in King's Lynn, Norfolk. Here, I thought, is what someone with vision can achieve when tackling a multi-storey car park. The overall shape is fine, but the detailing is excellent, and simple. Walls of terra-cotta like squares, punctured by tall, rectangular openings in groups of three are set against white foil-like vanes mounted at different angles that give a blurred, rippled effect, an illusion of movement and airy lightness. On some days they must seem to merge with the sky. What I especially liked was the sharp detail of the walls against the insubstantiality of the vanes when they were seen from an angle. In fact, bringing a light feel to something like a muti-storey is quite an achievement, and one you don't often see.

I took quite a few detail shots of the building, images that are largely semi-abstract in nature, and I regret not taking a couple of the whole structure. Perhaps next time I'm there I will.

photographs and text (c) T. Boughen

Main Photo
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 191mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On