The key phases of the development of the architectures devoted to cars in the twenty arrondissements of Paris shed light on the inception and transformations of a quantitatively significant built heritage that is nevertheless little known, that of purpose-built garages, real “hotels for automobiles.” This historical account presents the highlights of the construction of these buildings alongside those of the automotive revolution and Parisian mobility.
It starts with the arrival of the automobile in the French capital during the Belle Époque, moves on to the prolific interwar years, then to the so-called thirty “glorious” years of the postwar economic boom, the Trente Glorieuses (perhaps now to be best remembered as the “Thirty Polluters?”), and finally enters the time of disenchantment and the gradual end of the car age after the oil shocks of the 1970s, when new uses remain to be invented for obsolescent buildings.
Each of these major stages is illustrated by several buildings, selected for their outstanding architectural, urban or structural value, or because they are particularly representative of the period. This is of course a subjective selection from a corpus that is far from being exhaustive, to be found in the booklet published in conjunction with this chronology. The panorama or architectures and landscapes generated for and around the automobile remains an open field of research, one that focuses on buildings that are still poorly understood and recognized.

Paris is undoubtedly the cradle of the so-called automotive “revolution,” and boasts a string of world firsts: first commercial sales, by Panhard & Levassor in 1891; starting point of the first city-to-city races; first automobile magazines; first Automobile Club; first international auto show; first traffic and parking regulations… as well as the first buildings specially designed for this unprecedented technical object.
As car factories were established along the Seine in the Western suburbs of Paris, somewhere where land was affordable to develop workshops and test tracks, other buildings appeared in the city itself, especially in the Western arrondissements, where there resided a customer base wealthy enough to purchase such a fabulous toy, as well as to house and employ a chauffeur to drive and maintain it. Showrooms flourished along the Champs-Élysées, as well as many garages and workshops for automobile maintenance and repair in their vicinity. Though the automobiles were often stored in conversions of buildings constructed for other purposes—livery stables, fodder warehouses, indoor markets…—, a new program gradually appeared: that of the urban garage, featuring workshops, washing facilities, and, above all, storage facilities designed and delineated with a view to keeping the fragile drives safe. Reinforced concrete construction methods appeared roughly at the same time and were employed for the foundations, columns, and floor spans, and soon, for the entire structure of these buildings.

Characteristic of the reuse of existing built spaces, this storage, sale, repair, and rental garage was installed in a covered market dating from 1875. Inside, the cars are housed on the ground and in galleries made of reinforced concrete in a structure that was independent of the ironwork hall. Outside, on the corner, an Art Nouveau-style pediment was added, popular as they were for shops at the time.

In spite of its demolition at the end of the 1960s, this Auguste Perret-signed garage remains one of the lasting icons of modern architecture, and can be found in any textbook (its façade at least). Around a large rosette window (perhaps evoking the beam of an automobile headlight), the façade, where constructive rationalism is displayed esthetically, is constructed of raw reinforced concrete which, inside, makes up the whole load-bearing structure. The narrow building has two cantilevered gallery floors, as well as workshops on the third floor, which are better lit and better ventilated. A mechanical turntable, car elevators, and rolling bridges allow private cars to be directed to their reserved parking space, or to the washing yard, located at the back of the plot. A showroom and dealership is placed on the front façade.

Following the Great War, the major manufacturers—already Peugeot, Renault, and Citroën—turned to the mass production of cars, transplanting Ford’s innovations in terms of manufacturing and distribution on French soil. Though remaining costly to acquire and the preserve of a wealthy elite, cars started proliferating and became somewhat commonplace, casting out anything horse-drawn from the city. Architects started planning storage areas for the individual cars of residents on the ground floor or in the basement of residential buildings. Other car owners rented or purchased parking spaces in “hotels for automobiles,” collective high-capacity garages which underwent a construction boom in the Paris of the late 1920s. Along with movie theaters and airports, “automobile stations”, the grands garages, are one of the prime modern programs—a multistorey building, typically built in reinforced concrete and featuring a ramp serving them, by then preferred to mechanical elevators. In addition to its main function of storing idle automobiles, the grand garage was an all-encompassing service stop, including a maintenance area, a washing deck, a lubrication station, auto parts stores, and perhaps gas storage. The building could also serve as an exhibition and sales room for the dealership of one of the major brands. As for the top floors, they sometimes accommodated facilities for “elegant” sports such as tennis, golf, or Argentinian pelota…

The building commissioned by the Italian car manufacturer to Mallet-Stevens—an already famous architect—is actually an existing building that has been transformed and repurposed. The garage, which has a 800 m² ground floor and four stories “suspended” across parabolic arches made of reinforced concrete, is organized around the courtyard, which was retained from the former building. “Of great elegance, with great simplicity,” the highly symmetric commercial frontage with its two showcases was outshined by the giant dealership that opened right next door in 1928.

The first garage was built in 1925, between Rue de Marignan and Rue Marbeuf, for Marbeuf-Automobiles, a company that belonged to Maurice Bunau-Varilla, a press magnate and major Citroën dealer. It has nine stories served by two ramps that collectively stretch 1 km; the roof terrace is used for driving lessons. An extension was built on Rue Marbeuf in 1928—a showroom with a wind display 21 m high and 10 m wide. In the huge hall of the dealership, a plethora of “ready-to-park” cars occupy five levels of slightly cantilevered galleries. Like a dressed-up audience on the balconies of a theater, they face the scene of the street, as well as its current and future drivers. This spectacular giant store was demolished in the early 1950s.

Designed to house 800 cars, this garage is characterized by its ascending and descending ramps forming a double concentric helix—a system patented by the Farradèche himself in 1928. The design ensures one-way circulation within the building. Accessed by private elevators, the upper floors (7^th, 8^th, and 9^th) are used for sports clubs, and include a bar, tea room, restaurant, tennis court, and an Argentinian pelota court with seating for 300 spectators. Listed as a historical monument in 1986, it is the only garage in Paris that has that status.

Renault 4 CV, Citroën 2 CV… As the postwar economic boom began, the first real “popular” cars entered the market. The number of cars in Paris is estimated to have boomed from 600,000 in the mid-1950s to over 2 million cars in the mid-1960s, though the number of Parisians had decreased slightly. The offer of commercial storage facilities—by then called “garages-parkings” in French, and parking lots in English—continued expanding, though many car owners were reluctant to pay for parking. Their cars were then weatherproof and could be parked on public roads, something that had only just been made legal—and remained free until the early 1970s.
To help relieve traffic and free up the streets, as well as to facilitate the penetration of cars at the very heart of the city, the creation of parking areas was gradually taken over by the local authority using concession contracts. The underground option, advocated since the 1920s, was preferred: the first large underground garage—two levels deep, excavated under the Esplanade des Invalides—was inaugurated in 1964, providing 720 parking spaces, as well as an Azur-branded gas station. However, there are also some multistorey buildings dedicated to parking, such as the huge “garage-parking” on Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré in the 1st arrondissement, a real public infrastructure featuring a fire station, a police station, a post office, a retail marketplace, a gas station, a fallout shelter, and 1,000 parking spaces.

Built on an irregularly shaped plot, which is not unusual in Paris, this garage, designed for 400 cars, uses the staggered-floor system. The lower part of the building is very open, and a maintenance and repair workshop with a gas station occupies the entire ground floor. A large awning shelters the cars parked in front of the petrol pumps.

“Société Paris-Charbons,” the name written on the first building permit application (dated November 1951) evokes the industrial role of Quai de Grenelle, soon incorporated in the new Front de Seine neighborhood. Behind the façades, which have a “radically rational” expression, is a “garage-parking”—a huge multi-story parking structure, with a gas station on the ground floor, and six stories arranged in staggered floors, accessed by a spectacular spiral ramp that is illuminated by a translucent concrete dome.

In front of the architectural masterpiece of the Dutch College of the Cité Internationale Universitaire which was designed by architect Willem Dudok in 1928, this 400-car facility has five staggered floors. A high-ceiling ground floor includes a showroom (for Citroën), a fully sheltered gas station, and offices on the balconies. The five additional floors that were originally planned for a hotel-restaurant were never constructed. Behind the building, the large single-storey workshop opening on Rue de la Tombe-Issoire has just given way to a residence for 365 students.

Replacing a covered market—which would, in more modern times, have undoubtedly been preserved and redeveloped—this large parking garage is the first to have been built on the initiative of the City of Paris, following a concession contract voted in 1954 and an architectural competition. Arranged in staggered floors offering a total floor area of 32,000 m², the building is designed for 1,000 cars of which 600 are in private garages for residents in the neighborhood, and 400 are for public use. In addition to the BP service station, several public services are located on the ground floor—a fire station and its barracks, the city’s street cleaning department, a post office, a police station, and a retail market. During construction, it was also decided to create a 125 m² fallout shelter in the second basement. Considered too modern in design, the façades were redesigned at the request of the Commission des sites in order to better fit in with the character of the urban square.

The history of discontent related to cars is as old as the history of cars themselves, but the criticisms of the misgivings of its omnipotence intensified starting in the 1970s, with the oil shocks that brought the post-war boom to an end. Traffic jams, accidents, chronic air contamination, visual and noise pollution, degradation of historic environments and natural areas, health hazards, threats to the very survival of the planet… A growing number of pressing reasons stimulated the desire to drastically reduce the importance of cars in the city, to develop public transport, promote walking and other non-motorized forms of transport, and cycling in particular. From there on, the “garages-parkings” started gradually becoming less useful and the very last one was built in the French capital at Porte de la Chapelle in 1976. Later, some of these great obsolescent buildings were torn down, as was the parking lot on Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré, while adaptive re-use was favored elsewhere as it is seen as an urban and architectural surgery that is milder and more respectful of heritage and environmental values.

Though the large parking garage built at the initiative of the City of Paris will only have had about thirty years of service life, it was universally considered “hideous.” Now demolished, it gives way to an office building with stores on the ground floor, and, twice a week, a retail market. Signed by the famous Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, the complex features a vast glazed hall, which, leaving aside the difference in scale, is somewhat reminiscent of the covered passages invented in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the basement levels are five stories which still offer 680 parking spots.

The reconversion of a reconversion: the large Citroën garage building which was erected in the early 1930s and included a hotel for travelers. It was first transformed into offices in 1979. From 1994 to 1997, it was transformed again, at the request of the City of Paris’ Régie immobilière, in order to accommodate 77 rental apartments. In order to provide them with adequate light, the courtyard in the core of the building was extended. On the urban square, in front of the classical rotunda by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, shops take up the ground floor, where cars were once prominently displayed.

A six-storey monolithic structure, the garage was built around 1929 to house the taxis of the Compagnie générale des voitures. This company was founded under the Second Empire and had transitioned to motor cars as early as 1906. From 1974 to 2002, the building was used as a parking garage for the Parisian fleet of postal vehicles. The redevelopment consists of a fairly heavy restructuring, transforming the 40,000 m² of garage floors into five separate buildings linked by walkways and offering 20,306 m² of office space—the equivalent of 1,600 workstations. Completed in 2014, the operation, initially called Carré Bréguet, and since renamed Parisquare, includes an underground car park with 302 spaces.

Occupying a surface of 775 m², the site includes two buildings on the streetside, and a four-storey parking garage at the rear of the plot, which was built in 1926 by architect Hippolyte Brun. The City of Paris exercised its pre-emptive rights to acquire it in 2013. Across the renovated Haussmann buildings and the converted garage, the program offers a total of 34 social housing units and three business premises. The complex was commissioned in March 2018. For the façades of the multi-story parking garage, the architect retains an “industrial” style.

Published in the book "Immeubles pour automobiles" published by the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in 2018.