How to Park a Car
102 Cars look clegam in anciem stone-built towns in Europe. Made of thinly rolled sheets of
iron and resin, they appear lighter against road and wall surf:Kcs emircly covered with thick
stone. On the other hand , they look differem in new suburban neighborhoods or shopping
streets in Japan. Against surrounding wooden houses and plastic billboards as backdrops, they
appear unsophisticated. In addition to their visual ponderosiry, the small houses in residemial
landscapes of Tokyo engender any cars with undeniably heavy and massive physical presence.
Especially if a site is subdivided and its frontage is less than 8 m , the impression of the house
would largely depend on how a car is parked.
Looking at the rcl:uionship between cars and houses as we walk in residential areas of
Tokyo, we must admit that different houses respond to this question in various ways. As it
stands now, parking spaces arc opportunistically secured and it looks as if abandoned cars
emerge every I 0 m along a srrcer. Nobody seems to care for th e beauty of automobi les itself,
the outlook of houses, or the relationship between parked cars and a street as an assemblage
of houses . To put it a little harshly, people arc only concerned abom ease with which to
park cars. Tl1is has become the only criterion for parking aesthetics without being able to
discuss how to park cars in broader terms. \'(/hile more rhan half a century has passed since
automobiles reached the masses, parking aesthetics is still left in the wild. It is high rime to
break away from this untamed state of parking. Parking is a common problem many houses
f..1ce . By turning this to our advantage , we can begin to consider the handling of auromobiles
as part of architecture and usc this as a clue to creating a new ourlook for rhc city.
The flrst-gcneration houses before th e popularization of private cars and the second-
generation houses immediately after it did nor have to devise how to accommodate cars. As
they had wider fromagc to the srrcct, cars could be parked unobtrusively at corners. Tl1ey
were also slim and not so rotund as those of today. In contrast, both the current third-
generation and future fourth -generation houses have a narrower frontage, so they have no
choice but to park cars in front or by roadsides. Cars co me in sight before we sec the houses.
Tl1cy have become components of the fac;ades. One of the most common scenes is a house
set back over 6m from the road with a too wide parking space in front of it. This would
facilitate parking, but the garden becomes smaller and the house recedes from the road,
losing intimacy with it. It is also common to park a car in a garden by the roadside but you
will not be able to relax there as you face your car all the time. In a prohibitively small site, 103
it looks as if a car has crashed into the house. If more than 50% of the front of the ground
Aoor is horizontally cut, and if the opening docs not have enough depth, it often looks like "a
car's hiding its head but not its butt." If a parking space is dug downwards and is lower than
the street level, a car looks like a giant mole crawling under the house. While it is reasonable
for a driver to park a car perpendicularly to the street, if the front of a building is only Gm
wide, then the parking entrance gets bigger than the entrance for people. This makes all of us
resrless as it pits people against cars into the barrie over the frontage.
Tl1c problem can be resolved if a garage is built into the ground floor of a building, thus
hiding a car from the street. However, suppose you see a row of houses whose ground floors
arc all garages along a street, you might find it rather bleak. It might also be construed to be
a capitalistic and individualistic landscape in which status materialism is symbolized by the
private ownership of cars. Many built-in garages might inadvertently suggest that the owners
suspect every person passing by to be all potential car thieves- based on the belief that the
humans arc intrinsically bad-and a street lined with such garages just do not look happy.
How can we, then , treat a car when a house has very narrow frontage?
Our answer is disarmingly simple: parking a car alongside the front of a house. If windows
arc placed above cars, the walls can be used as a backdrop against which ca rs' horizontally
oriented proportions can be measured and will cease to obstruct vic\VS from the windows. For
a standard-sized car, a setback of 2.5 m will be sufficient to provide adequate space between rhe
building and the street without afFecting the building-to-the land ratio. To avoid the exposure
of automobiles to rain, all you have to do is to protrude bay windows, the roof or the balcony
outwards towards the street. Supposing that a parking space in front of a house is created in
the slightly broadened pan of the street, it is virtually offered to the continuous public space.
Now, unhampe red by a car, th e house will attain a dignified presence with enough recess
even if modest in size. Thus, rhe presence or absence of a car becomes irrelevant to the way
we conceptuali ze houses . Pur another way, cars can be removed from the considerations for
designing houses. Yet, this docs not mean that they can be completely neglected. It simply
means that we seck to define a parking space as a usability of interstitial space between a
house and the site boundary in order to highlight rhe elegance, and at times, humorous
104 3Spects of 3 c3 r. Even in a residential district of in creas in gly fragmented sires, this method
of hand ling ca rs, once introduced to all houses in rh c d istri ct, wi ll m3ke the scene appe3 r
considerably more intelligent.

O n the other hand, parts of some houses structured specifi cally in response to cars, built-
in garages for example, ca n be taken as a materialized form of the fear of vandalism. Such
spaces, designed on the basis of anxiety and susp icion, look stiAing and unpleasant. In today's
public spaces, there are far too many form s born our of dist rust of people: sidewalk fen ces
with barbed wire; and benches d ivided into small sect io ns by armrests to prevent peopl e
from lyin g down. Th ese are the phys ical manifestatio ns of owners' preconceptions, and th ey
arc nor ope n enough as objects in public space. Sure, there may have been many th ings to
worry abo ut, but creative efforts must be made to keep them from forming the primary basis
of architectural shape, and th at is where des ign ca n be uti lized for public benefits. In our
approach to residential houses, rhe observation of parking resu lts in the specific sire plans and
its details-the devices for preventing parking spaces from being embedded into rhe forms of
houses . This is what we call "Observation and Non-Embedment."