ABSTRACT
Valley Forge/King of Prussia is the kind of cityscape that Rem Koolhaas refers to when he says that the modern world has swept traditional ideas of urban form away. The increased density starts to create sites that can be served by rapid transit. If a new rapid-transit line allows a building owner with at-grade parking to reduce the parking ratio, the land made available is effectively free. Any development is made more feasible by free land. Highway interchanges fragment development into quadrants; the development within the quadrant is then fragmented further by at-grade parking. A parking space is generally considered to require about 350 square feet: 200. The tide of parking spaces that has swept away traditional building relationships, might go back out again, as land values increase. The economics of parking have a big influence on the dispersal of development from city centers to accessible highway locations like Tysons Corner in Virginia or Valley Forge/King of Prussia.
