SOUTH LAWN CAR PARK Melbourne

It’s likely that you won’t travel all the way to Australia to visit a car park. But if you happen to be in Melbourne, then do pause in this unusual garage—if not for its serious architectural pedigree, then for its cinematic history.

Below the University of Melbourne’s main, leafy campus in Parkville, ten minutes’ walk from the city centre, South Lawn Car Park was completed in 1972. Dreamed up by Dutch structural engineer Jan van der Molen, it resembles a low, shadowy forest of concrete mushrooms—wholly distinct to the neat, cheery greenery above.

Consisting, specifically, of reinforced shells with parabolic arches atop short columns, van der Molen’s design was soon being lauded by architectural historian Miles Lewis as Australia’s “most important non-residential design”.

So striking is the now-listed car park that it has frequently lured film crews. South Lawn’s most famous credit, however, came when hosting the police-garage scene in the original Mad Max movie—when Mel Gibson’s character is delightedly introduced to the “last of the V8s”.

Despite its gothic looks, van der Molen’s space is also lifegiving. Those concrete shells’ deep bowls enable large trees to be planted on South Lawn’s roof, with pipes inside columns helping to drain their soil.

Try to arrive and leave at different ends. Framed by two sculpted Atlas figures, the car park’s grotto-style western entrance uses a salvaged doorway from the demolished Colonial Bank of Australasia while its eastern door off Wilson Avenue hails from an 18th-century house in Dublin, Ireland.

HIDDEN GEMS