The most interesting car-architecture

Roundabout art and roadside oddities, this month we’re sharing some of our favourite bizarre car architecture from Architecture for Cars by Christopher Beanland.

Words by Christopher Beanland.

Meriadeck 

BORDEAUX, FRANCE 

I was alerted to this concoction by Jonathan Meades, who lived near Bordeaux before relocating to Le Corbusier’s Unite in Marseille. The Bordeaux countryside was too bland for him – Meriadeck was not. It featured in one of his Jonathan Meades on France BBC TV essays, specifically the Caisse d’Epargne bank, a brutalist spaceship apparently sent to Earth in Aquitaine. The Meriadeck district was a mid-century Alphaville idea inspired by Colin Buchanan’s grade-separation dogma where pedestrians had to be on podia up above vehicles. It shares a style with La Défense in Paris, parts of Birmingham and the dystopian double-level Lower Grand Avenue in Downtown LA where The Terminator was filmed. Meriadeck’s platform sits above the main roads, with escalators up and down to the road, a shopping mall, interesting cruciform blocks including more than one hotel, a park and of course this bank. At night it’s all so sci-fi and so far removed from the picture-postcard views of the classical city that tourists come for. 

Faroes Tunnels

FAROE ISLANDS

The one corner of Europe I’d encourage everyone to visit, the Faroes defy the waffle of travel journalism prose. Their monumental seascapes are a clash: of land and water, of people and the elements, and of people and wildlife. The gallant topography of vertical cliffs on which puffins nest is cut through with mighty fjords, and this harsh terrain dominated life for centuries. The only way around was by sea. And even when roads came you still had to use ferries to fill in the gaps. In the last 50 years a big bath of Danish money has been lavished on challenging these landscapes with tunnels that cross the seas and link the tiny towns. They cancel the need for countless ferries and give the (wrong) impression that it’s just one island. One even has a roundabout in it deep under the cold Norwegian Sea, unique in road tunnels. 

America’s Roadside Oddities

USA

As a child I was captivated by a book given to me by my maternal grandmother which detailed a whole series of things you could see along America’s long interstate freeways. Of course, there were the obvious stops like Mount Rushmore and the Civil War battlefields, but there was more eccentric material too, like big, strange sculptures and kooky stores that Denise Scott Brown picked out in her Proto-Pomo classic tome Learning from Las Vegas and termed ‘ducks’. The Teapot Dome gas station in Washington State or the Big Fish Supper Club in Minnesota. Or how about Lucy the giant elephant in New Jersey. The Longaberger Basket Building in Ohio and the Beagle Motel in Idaho have since been added to this list and have captured the imagination of contemporary architectural adventurers like the great Rolando Pujol, who documents this quirky past and is interviewed in this book.

Roundabout Art

UK, SPAIN, PORTUGAL, FRANCE

You might do a double take approaching the Dotterel roundabout near Reighton in Yorkshire because it looks from afar as if there are sheep grazing on it. Approaching, you quickly realize it’s just another baaaarmy artwork – roundabouts in recent times have been taken over by all kinds of sculptures from the silly to the sublime. Honestly, most of them are crap, but there is fun to be had: in France, the huge kiwi in two halves on the Peyrehorade–Bayonne road in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, or the giant chair of Hagetmau. Jean-Luc Plé sounds like a made-up name for an artist, but he is responsible for the paper boats of La Tremblade and the legendary snail on the Lorignac roundabout, whose speed drivers would do well to ape. A replica of the 1960s Aerotrain sits on a roundabout at Gometz-la-Ville. In Portugal there seems to be a proliferation of these sculptures around Sesimbra, with all kinds of boats and knights on roundabouts. For the best examples, head to Lanzarote, where César Manrique’s sculptures trump all other roundabout art across the globe. These works are potent and starred in the Almodóvar classic Broken Embraces.

Lingotto Factory

Turin, Italy

The Italy of the futurists and the white-hot modernism of a new industrial world made its presence felt in a corner of Turin that will forever be associated with the dynamism of the car. The Lingotto factory went up in the 1920s as a symbol of a thrusting new nation that was looking to the future. The highpoint was the rooftop test track, banked, incomparable to anything anywhere else in the world, a place where cars could speed round in the sky; a taste of the future. This was the FIAT factory where cars were manufactured and then could be run round at speed on the roof. It was a kind of European answer to River Rouge – Henry Ford’s all-in-one factory complex at Dearborn, near Detroit. But Lingotto made everything vertical as if out of a futurist cartoon. It later featured in The Italian Job.

More about Architecture for Cars:

A smooth ride through the golden age of car travel, looking at both its cultural and architectural impact on the world. The culture of road travel and the road trip is arguably best reflected in the stationary spots found along the way. Christopher Beanland journeys through these built environments the world over, whose sole purpose is to cater to cars and those who drive them, and examines what makes them so alluring.

Architecture for Cars by Christopher Beanland is available to purchase here and from all good booksellers.

Photography by Valentin Jack and McGhiever.