Appendix
Seoul
South Korea, 2018

In Seoul, vertical parking structures with lift systems appear as an almost self evident response to scarcity: in a dense city where narrow residential streets and aging low rise neighborhoods struggle structurally with parking pressure, the car is no longer spread out horizontally but stored upright.

These parking towers often seem to escape architectural design altogether, as if they were standing beside the building like an appendix. They frequently operate as automated towers. A car is placed on a platform or lift plate, after which the system moves it vertically to an available space within a compact multi level structure. Seoul addresses the lack of space not by placing less emphasis on the car, but by making infrastructure ever denser and more mechanized. Policies around parking buildings have even recently been relaxed to allow more parking capacity in the city center. In this way, the vertical parking tower becomes more than a technical object: it is a compact machine in which land value, mobility, and urban pressure are literally stacked on top of one another.