I watched a parking lot get built behind my childhood house in 1987 and it was something I could not shake from memory because nobody talked about what that flat sheet of cracked asphalt represented in the landscape around us. The crew arrived with a compactor, a concrete truck, and a guy walking around with a laser level checking that rain would drain toward the curb. There were no trees there anymore - just graded earth. No one hired an architect for this site, which means the most basic building form in American history is simply flat ground filled with asphalt painted with white lines.

This parking lot covered more of the landscape than my house does. Since the mid 1980s every American city has expanded outward adding pavement for vehicle storage, covering ground where trees stood before and replacing them with hard surfaces designed for nothing except holding cars until someone needed to drive somewhere else. These paved surfaces are buildings without walls or windows or roofs that people don’t think of as architecture but they take up more land than any other building type in major American cities and they were built by laborers following specifications written on paper.

The people who built those spaces follow a developer’s dimensional drawing showing exactly how many cars fit between two temporary chain link fences marking the lot perimeter. Nobody designed them to be useful or beautiful. They covered ground where there used to be trees and that was not architecture so much as earth moving equipment followed by asphalt paving operations establishing impervious cover preventing rainfall absorption generating increased stormwater runoff and directing drainage toward municipal systems connecting underground pipe networks routing collected water treatment facilities processing contaminated effluent discharging into receiving water bodies.

I do not know what this parking lot story says about us beyond the fact that it is real. The spaces between buildings in American cities were not built by anyone who thought aesthetics mattered alongside vehicle storage functionality. Nobody designed those flat surfaces considering whether they would shade summer heat, whether they would collect morning dew, whether the white lines we paint on them mean anything other than “park here.” The crew graded ground flat, removed topography with machine equipment, then paved it.

We cover our cities with parking lots because convenience became cheaper than design and nobody questioned that choice. The most common building type in America has no architect and its lifespan is measured in years rather than decades or centuries and that should say something about how we treat infrastructure even when it covers the ground permanently, which I think was what the 1987 parking lot behind my childhood house meant when everyone who built it went home after grading, pouring concrete, spraying white lines, and closing temporary chain link perimeter fencing without anyone talking about it beyond what that flat sheet of cracked asphalt represented in the landscape around them.