Architect and scholar Shannon Sanders McDonald stepped out on a recent afternoon into a building that in her view stands as one of the most significant forms in architecture, an "It" structure, a hub around which today's urban development revolves.
A nationally recognized authority on parking garages, McDonald walked from the Towson Town Center food court to Level C4 East, where she had parked her Mazda Miata. From here she would begin the tour of nearby examples of the architectural form she's been studying for nearly 20 years.
McDonald, of Towson, watched as cars rounded sharp turns, rolling over the expansion joints on the garage floor, triggering occasional metallic thunder claps.
"I've never seen anything so complex in all my life," she said, referring to the structure's many levels and sections.
That's a lot coming from McDonald, who wrote a 312-page book that looks at garages from one end of the United States to the other — from the elegant glass-and-stone entryway of an underground garage at Stanford University Medical Center in California to a soaring glass-and-steel parking tower in downtown Atlanta.
She argues in her book that the parking garage is the key building on the urban and suburban scene, the point through which much else flows.
"The parking garage is the connective piece for everything, that's the point here," said McDonald. "Because most people have to use it … then they have to go through it to get where they're going."
She said Towson Town Center garage is notable for the construction techniques that allow for great expanses of space inside with few vertical columns. Too bad the expanses in every direction are relentlessly gray, and the garage captures much of what she insists is wrong with so many garages.
"This is a pretty inhospitable place," said McDonald, who holds a Yale architecture degree and strong views on parking garages. She'll air those views in a National Public Radio broadcast of "The Diane Rehm Show" scheduled for WednesdayJuly 7. It was McDonald's book, "The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form," published by the Urban Land Institute in 2007, that inspired a current exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington.
Sarah Leavitt, a National Building Museum curator who worked on the "House of Cars" exhibit, said McDonald's is one of four major books on the subject, set apart by its emphasis on history and its argument for the significance of the parking garage in shaping the urban landscape.
Once the museum received a copy of the book from the publisher, Leavitt said, "our curatorial team immediately fixated on it as a great story to tell."
McDonald, a Baltimore City native, is an architect and former schoolteacher who had been living for years in Connecticut, Chicago and Atlanta. She recently moved back to this area, where it happens she lives in Baltimore County's parking garage capital: Towson. Just about everywhere, there's a garage looming over the walkways of stores, restaurants, banks, government offices and churches.
The walkability is so much of central Towson's appeal, said McDonald, and the parking garage can do a lot to enhance or diminish the experience.
Her book details the early 20th century, when the garage would often be as handsome a piece of architecture as any in town, looking much like any other building: doors, windows, porticos, stonework details.
The garage interiors in the early days were unseen by the public, as the garages offered only valet parking. Chauffeurs and attendants were privy to the inside, and sometimes the accommodations weren't bad. One photograph in the abundantly illustrated book shows a gathering of chauffeurs playing cards in a 1912 New York garage lounge that could be a scene from a men's club.
That all changed between 1930 and 1950, when the garages assumed the distinct open-air deck configuration common today, and when the shift was made from valet to self-service parking. During that time, the garage became a place to accommodate people, even if it was originally designed for machines, "not living beings — a problem that persists to this day," McDonald wrote.
Forbidding, cavernous, often dimly lit, the garage is usually something to be rushed through and tolerated.
"Imagine what it would be like if you could see into the stores" from the garage, McDonald said.
Some shopping malls are designed that way, giving the garage more light and color. In at least one case, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the garage itself is such an elegant structure that it was built so it could be seen from inside the museum.
Much the same principle applies outside of parking garages. Standing outside one Baltimore County garage on Washington Avenue, McDonald noted that the builders at least put a few planters on the Washington Avenue side to break up the monotony. Along Susquehanna Avenue, though, it's one long stretch of concrete along the sidewalk. No plants, murals, storefronts, nothing.
"See, this seems a very desolate place," McDonald said. Put enough of that together in one place, and you've lost the sense of place, hence the key role of the garage in making or breaking an urban setting.
McDonald is hopeful that the 21st century will improve on the 20th in integrating the parking garage more gracefully in cities and towns, especially as automobile designs change in the switch away from gasoline power. Little cars might be tucked into apartment spaces. Garages could look nothing like the hulking behemoths we've come to know and ignore.
"I just think it's going to be amazingly exciting," said McDonald, who recognizes that her enthusiasm for the topic is not necessarily universal. "People look at me like I'm crazy."
Shannon Sanders McDonald
Profession: Architect
Born: Baltimore City
Residence: Towson
Education: Yale University, Master of Architecture; Towson University, Bachelor of Science in Education and Psychology; Maryland Institute College of Art, Master of Fine Arts.
Book: "The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form"