Parking in Style

A series of photographs from back in the day when owning a car was a luxury associated with certain obligations to style.

In response to the growing number of private cars in the inner city and the ensuing shortage of parking space, the first underground parking garage in Vienna, the Votivgarage, was opened in 1960. The prestigious project in the spirit of modernism featured drive-in banking, an underground bar and restaurant and hostesses on roller skates in red uniforms showing patrons to their parking spot.

All historic photos: WIPark

Articles in Austrian newspaper Der Standard (in German):

Zeitreise: Parken in der Votivgarage anno 1960

Als Tiefgaragen noch voller Luxus waren

Shocking Acts of Cultural Preservation and Repair

Les UX or Urban eXperiment is an underground organisation restoring or improving the city of Paris in secret, through repurposing hidden places, setting up pirate movie theatres and “shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair”. 

Evolving from a group of teenagers dedicated to urban exploration of the hidden features of Paris since the early eighties, one of the sensational feats of UX´s subgroup Untergunther, specifically dedicated to restoration was the clandestine restoration of  the Panthéon´s 19^th century clock. 

The Panthéon´s administration´s immediate reaction was to bring charges against the group.

"The New French Hacker-Artist Underground"- article by Jon Lackman in WIRED magazine. 

“Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.”

"Pantheon, User´s Guide". Screenshot from  a film by Lazar Kunstmann at Untergunther.

Creating a better world for nothing?

"What if we create a better world for nothing?" Cartoon by Joel Pett

"Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal" by Peter Gleick.