High-Rise Carpark:
An Allegory For* the consequences
of Modernity & the Moderns.
T. Stuart (2021).
Abstract
The High-Rise Carpark reveals the unfiltered manifestation of our modern inclinations and attitudes. While outside the car park we conform to appropriate social norms. We do not curse at strangers, drop rubbish or break road rules. But when inside that raw honest place, all our social bad behaviours and the ugly side of our modern inner selves are revealed. That great concrete monstrosity shows us who we are. The High-Rise Carpark is truth-sayer and a mirror of the self in the modern world. This project explores the High-Rise Carpark as a case study into the ills of modern society. It shows how the carpark is a frontline for a society based upon massive ubiquitous overconsumption and environmental disregard, and presents to us those unspoken shamelessly presented consequences of Modernity.
Entering the Mouth of a Giant
I pull off the main road into a slip lane and park behind a dozen or so cars waiting to enter the High-Rise Carpark. Cracked concrete and rubbish line the side street at its entrance. It’s almost like an invisible force pushes the city’s trash to this particular spot, knowing that here it will remain untidied and imperceptible to the town’s cleaners. I watch as a cleaner scurries on by on an automatic cleaning vehicle, looking oblivious to the mound of rubbish at the entrance of the High-Rise Carpark. Life at the carpark’s massive doorway is less diligent than in other places throughout the city.
Carparks are places of continual movement, nothing is ever still in a carpark. Especially near its entrance. Cars pour in and out, in peak traffic, hundreds by the minute pass its gates. I inch forward, closer to the entrance, and see the car in front of me waiting on that awkward space where its’ bumper rests slightly on the pedestrian path, and partly still on the road. A pedestrian walks towards the car, he stops. Looks at the driver, looks toward the path, then back to the driver. The driver waves to go, then the pedestrian takes a step forward. He stops again. He looks back to the driver and waves for the driver to go. The driver nods his head, then zooms past much more quickly than is necessary, and with even greater speed hits the breaks again once he has crossed the footpath. Finally, the pedestrian walks by before the next car reaches that awkward liminal space between the path and road once again, where all normal social function seems to break down and nobody on earth seems to know what they’re doing.
“Screatcchhhchch”, a car slams its breaks on behind me, followed by a revving of another engine and a “Fuck head!”, as a driver zooms past with his fist out the window. I can only surmise what has occurred, but much like the liminal space in front of me, so too, is there one behind. That location where cars queue to get into the car park line-up. Occasionally, the queue will spill out of the designated waiting space, and into the main traffic lane. When this happens, an interruption occurs between those waiting, and those seeking to get by. These interactions often don’t go well. I look to my left and read the sign in big black letters, ‘NO QUEUING’. Nobody pays attention to those kinds of signs at the entrance of a carpark. They’re magical places, where all social rules break down.
Finally, it’s my turn to pass the pedestrian path. Luckily, no people are walking by, and I drive over the footpath without any concerns. I wind down my window and get ready to take a ticket. Only a few cars are in front of me. Now I’m off the footpath, I enter the gigantic mouth of the carpark. It’s ever hungry for more vehicles, and it gobbles up my small car as if it’s a morsel. I enter its’ dark and gloomy innards, ready to meet the gatekeeper.
The Cost of Admission
I carefully pull up to the ticket machine and reach-out to take a ticket. “Full”, the machine reads. I sit, waiting for a minute for another car to leave, before a ticket can pop out, and the rickety old arm will lift to let me pass. Who would have thought that the gatekeeper to such a gigantic monster, worth tens of millions of dollars, would be some old rickety plastic arm. I think of Cerberus from Greek mythology, guarding the underworld, it seems modern people protect their dark spaces far less rigorously. But here in the modern city, people don’t want to go into places like this, just the same as they don’t want to go into hell. The secrets of the underworld have been lost to the moderns. There is nothing of real value for us humans there, just momentary annoyance or worse. Even though these places are money machines, it’s not as if they keep the gold bullion up stairs. Hades, might have done better by putting a rickety old automated arm at the entrance of hell, rather than his monstrous two headed Cerberus. The old saying, ‘wasted talent’ comes to mind.
I’m jolted from my thoughts as an exiting car arrives opposite me, a window slides down, and a hairy tattooed arm reaches out and places a ticket into the exiting machine. The gate arm in front of their car lifts and they accelerate out of the carpark. A large poof of dirty exhaust smoke follows their car’s wake, and wafts right into my window. ‘Too late to wind the window up’, I think, and gag and cough, inhaling a large mouthful of dirty pollution. I take my ticket, the gate keeper lifts his old rickety arm and I drive on through, clunking over a few speed bumps while still stuttering away. I shamelessly, hack up a mouthful of toxic brown like gunk and slag it out the window onto the carpark road and my coughing finally eases up. I watch the spittle fly through the air, and land with an impact onto the road. It seems to vanish into a mess of black oil and tyre marks mixed with many chucks of spat out chewing gum that have coagulated into immovable filth. This is the cost of admission. A financial agreement to pay the man and a lung full of filth to seal the deal.
The Many Floored Ascent
Fluorescent coloured paint covers the walls. Much like the floor, its best days are long passed. Brown coloured leaks of water, and layers of smoke from car fumes, dirt and dust cake the surface. Marks that look like urine, spit, and food can be seen scattered around the place. The innards of the carpark make its entrance look clean and cleaners have almost certainly abandoned this place, other than in the most superficial of ways. The drive upwards through the carpark has many repeating bends and turns and I feel a little like a marble tumbling through a dirty pipe.
I work my way up the many floors. New fluorescent colours greet me at each level, and to further help with the confusion of getting lost huge numbers are painted onto the walls. ‘LEVEL 1’, ‘LEVEL 2’, and so on. Even the floors have massive arrows pointing in the direction of up, and on the road next to me, pointing in the direction of down. If an alien race were to visit this place, they may be forgiven for thinking a race of intellectually challenged giants may have lived here.
Hawk like, I peer around the tight corners, my head turning quickly from one side to the other hoping a person may be leaving so I can take their parking space. There are cars in front of me but I leave a gap wide enough that I may sneak a spot they missed. Others tailgate, hoping to push the convoy upward faster. Our clash of parking philosophies bump heads as one driver stops to wait for a pedestrian slowly making their way to their car. I see the drivers stuck behind lift their hands up in frustrated gestures. One person beeps, and the peer pressure from the group causes the person now stopped to speed off in frustration. Only a second later, the car behind clicks their indicator on and waits for the pedestrian to reach their vehicle and leave. Like a squabbling pack of seagulls battling over a single chip, this backhanded injustice with he who can squawk the loudest leading the way.
I reach floor six and find an empty space. I pull in and turn the engine off. Steeping out of the car I am greeted by a pungent smell, and some greasy messy filth sprayed on the wall beside me. What it is I cannot say, it has a bizarre similarity to a urinal wall in a male toilets. A few chunks of broken concrete sit beneath the stain accompanied by an empty McDonalds chip packet. The smell is as equally strange as is the odd assortment, acidic and faecal. I sidestep it and head toward the staircase.
A Consumer in a Desert
Walking along the road toward the staircase I notice no other people around. All the parks are full, several dozen cars on this level alone, but nobody can be seen. So many people continually flow though this place, but where have they all gone? Reaching the staircase, I open the creaky door and head in. There are no foot steps other than my own that echo throughout the carpark’s tall shafted staircase. This place is a desert.
A moment passes and a door on one of the lower levels opens. I descend further down the winding staircase and pass a lady carrying half a dozen shopping bags. She is dressed in a bright summer dress and she stands out against the dull grey concrete backdrop. She passes by with her head looking down, and zips into an exit door. A consumer, returned from her shopping trip to collect her vehicle before heading home.
Other than the shopper there is no sign of life. No animals, or nature. No mouse or bird droppings can be seen. No nature can be found creeping in. Not a single root, or grain of dirt. I can’t seem to halt the never ending encroachment of weeds from my concrete driveway, but here nature’s progress has halted completely, she is barren in this place. And nor is there anything here for her, no soil to take root, only dirty fumes to poison any life that may stumble in at their detriment.
Aesthetics have no place in a carpark. Carparks are an eyesore, ugly, dirty, tasteless, and boring. Beauty for the sake of beauty does not matter here, only the making of money, the cold rationality of functionalism, and the storage and security of our property. These are the purposes of the High-Rise Carpark.
This place exists as an anomaly in history, a new monster never before seen. It represents how massive our consumption of things has grown. Here in this giant monstrous building many hundreds of cars are housed, tens of millions of dollars. This building’s sole purpose is to support our ubiquitous consumer needs; to facilitate the need of our ever growing accumulation of material things. It is, to put it rather crassly, the place in which we store our scat, both literally and metaphorically.
The Future?
By international standards, I live in a meagre city, of only a couple hundred thousand residents. The central business district is only small, not more than two or so small city blocks in size. Yet here, six High-Rise Carparks surround this space, and many more single floored designated parking sites. Not to mention every street is lined with parking spaces. Where once there were trees they have been levelled for the development of more parking spaces. I thought nature’s weeds on my driveway were stubborn, but nothing seems to have the permanence and resilience of the proliferation of carparks.
I wonder how the carpark will be viewed by future generations? The idealist in me hopes it will be seen as a relic of the past, and be thought of as a blight of modernity, a momentary failure in our steps to a green, more globally sustainable future where such monsters have been slain along with our questionable ethics of over consumption. But the sterilisation of nature seems to march on. The pessimist in me, sees the carpark as a pox, ready to explode its over consumption, pollution, self indulgence and eradication of all things green upon the world. It remains to be seen if this place is an accidental stepping stone to a better future, or a herald of the end of the natural and ethical social worlds as we know them? Whatever that site may become, it is nonetheless a force of matter forged by us, and forced upon us; an allegory for what we have become and of the consequences of modern people and their practices.
*The Descent of Gnosis.