In many U.S. residences, the garage is the dominant feature of a building’s design.Ultimately, I’ve been most absorbed with the chapters Grabar devotes to the intersection of housing and parking — and the ways in which parking has shaped not only the design of our homes but also our ability to build them to begin with. Parking lots and garages — especially underground parking — consume vast amounts of land and are expensive to build; as a result, they send construction costs skyrocketing.
“Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-sized, infill apartment buildings like row houses, brownstones, and triple-deckers,” he writes. “The production of buildings with two and four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021.”I read Grabar’s book in tandem with Frances Anderton’s “