Our love affair with the car is a complicated one. We love the car, its form and design, and its performance, but we hate the slow-crawling mass of cars we have to struggle against in daily traffic. We love the convenience and accessibility the car provides, but we often decry the damage it has done to our cities, especially in treasured historic districts. We pay an enormous cost, directly or indirectly, to store our cars, at home or in a public car park.

But emerging innovations in both automotive and architectural spaces hold promise for a new relationship between our homes, our cars, and our work and leisure spaces. At Car Design News, we have previously explored these possibilities on a personal, residential level, but the larger public realm has been largely unexplored.

But just before the pandemic, BMW Group Designworks teamed up with Gensler Architects to research new opportunities in urban development that were somewhere between buildings and vehicles. They named this project Architecture X Mobility= A New Space Typology. Their teams worked throughout the pandemic and published their findings earlier this year.

We spoke with team leaders Neil Brooker, COO of Designworks in Santa Monica, California, and Jordan Goldstein, co-managing partner of Gensler’s Washington D.C. office, about the Architecture X Mobility project.