If you have ever opened a side door to see the lines of a parking space, or asked a passenger to get out and guide you in, you may be wondering where this simple solution has been for all your years of urban driving.

In some cases, like parallel street parking, it would be hard to implement. But in open lots or interior garages — anywhere with a wall, fence, guardrail or space for posts — it is just too obvious and easy not to do, yet too few places realize the opportunity.

In areas where it snows, these lines do a lot more than just help guide people into their final parking position — buried under fresh powder, they can represent the only way to keep a lot from devolving into a state of anarchy.

The Netherlands, where bikes outnumber citizens, is well known for its cycle-centric transportation infrastructure. In Utrecht, over 100,000 cyclists ride through the city every day, connecting between home, school, work and public transportation. Now open, this newly-built bicycle parking lot can already house 6,000 rides at a time, but is aiming to more than double that capacity by the end of the year.

It actually looks a lot like a conventional parking lot, filled with ramps and arrows pointing cyclists through the structure, crisscrossed with walking paths for people traveling to and from their personal vehicle. Dense stacking allows for layered storage across the multiple levels of the structure.

Eventually, the parking structure will store a remarkable 33,000 bicycles by 2020, which, to most people, might sound like a lot of bikes. But the design, patterned after Tokyo’s amazing underground bike parking station, has people worried — not because it could be overbuilt, but because the capacity might not match the demand.

As popular as cycling already is in the region, the number of people on bikes continues to grow and the Netherlands has long had storage space issues related to this growth. One cycling organization quoted John Lennon to make the point: “life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” They say politicians are still being too slow to make decisions and implement plans to increase bike-supporting infrastructure. Still, too many riders and fewer seems like a good problem for a city to have.

The lot purchased by a homeowner might be seemingly impossible – clinging to a sheer cliff, squeezing into tight spaces, or consisting of an odd geometric shape – but by god, architects will find a solution. Whether by building up from a postage-stamp-sized property, zig-zagging a house between its neighbors or designing a home in the shape of a giant X, architecture firms have found ways to use seemingly undesirable spaces, leading to some very unusual and imaginative residences.

Twisting Zig-Zag House

To most people, it wouldn’t seem like there was actually room for a new house in this extremely narrow, oddly-shaped space between several other residences. But in Japan, every square inch counts. Alphaville architects came up with a novel approach: a zig-zagging house that might skim its neighbors by mere inches in some spots, but still manages to feel private inside thanks to very careful placement of windows and courtyards.

X-Shaped Cliffside House

How do you build a house on a sheer cliff that has views on every side, but still feels private, and is virtually invisible from the street? Cadaval & Solá-Morales architects created a two-story, X-shaped residence that clings to the cliff, with the roof functioning as a driveway and terrace. Each side of the home’s edge gets its own sweeping view of Barcelona without facing any of the neighbors. Incisions at the top and bottom of the ‘X’ let in light while maintaining that privacy.

Super-Skinny Cliff-Hugging House

The slightest wedge of a lot on a rocky cliff gave way to this narrow, sloping house by Shuhei Endo. The triangular lot was confined by a Y-shaped intersection and several other residences, and gets as narrow as 5 feet at some points. Tucking the home beside the retaining wall anchors it, and a narrow space between the wall and the home provides a light-filled, private outdoor space with architectural interest.

Oceanfront Cabin on Stilts

The strip of land this oceanfront cabin is built upon is hardly larger than a parking spot. But owner of that land wanted Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects to create a relaxing weekend getaway overlooking Sagami Bay, with views of Mount Fuji in the distance. The result is ‘Window House,’ a slim residence built on steel poles to protect it from storm surges and enable those stunning views. The interior features staggered lofts accessible by stairs and ladders.

Spite House Built on Pie-Shaped Lot

The Seattle Spite House was built on a pie-shaped piece of land adjacent to a larger home, and gets so narrow at one end that it’s hard to open the oven door all the way. The story goes that it was built in 1925 out of spite because the tiny, odd-shaped lot was all that was given to a wife in a contentious divorce, and she was determined to make the most of it. The home sold for nearly $400K in 2013.

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No Lot Too Challenging 13 Ingenious Odd Shaped Houses

In a bold bid to change urban landscapes, a series of tiny home builders and enthusiasts has come together to turn empty space into a microcosmic example of what small-space living can mean for dense and high-cost cities like Washington D.C.

Starting with a small, awkward and triangular alley lot the Boneyard Studios group proceeded to clear the debris build a series of four small homes. “The lot originally had overgrown grass, broken concrete, pooling water, garbage, illegal parking, and occasional criminal activity (e.g. a dumped stolen vehicle).” 

Brian’s Minim House is clean, refined and modern featuring minimalist details, wood siding with black metal trim and a metal roof with solar panels. It also has interior features like in-seat storage and a pull-down screen for a space-saving projector television and video player.

Elaine’s Tumbleweed Lusby is framed and filled with warm wood, feeling as much like a cabin in the woods as it does a cottage in the city. It comes complete with a bamboo ladder leading up to a cozy lofted sleeping space.

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Boneyard Studios Vacant Lot Hosts New Micro Home Village

Challenged with designing something to fit a historic city-center context in “baroque, classic, neo-classical, romantic and neo-romantic style” is itself difficult if not paradoxical, but making that work for a multistory parking structure without devolving into kitsch seems nearly impossible.

Set in Skopje, Macedonia, the competition-winning solution by Milan Mijalkovic and  PPAG architects (images by Darko Hristov) is at once traditional in its aesthetic undertones and distinctively contemporary at the same time. It stems a careful study of cultural context and revisiting of architectural history in a place with a complex geographical and political past.

From the designers (via ArchDaily): “The façade interprets the wish for a historicist appearance without explicitly using the traditional language of historicism. It adapts the baroque idea of creating reality by the means of illusive perspective. Baroque artworks expand into the real space as well as vice versa the reality merges into the illusive perspective of the artwork.”

The finished product is thus neither faux-historical nor fully modern – it is interpretive yet highly original, playing on baroque themes without looking like a poor attempt to mimic past styles.

The pattern itself was derived from a single photograph of period residential architecture, distorted through a series of iterations rendering it intentionally unrecognizable.

Beyond the aesthetic accomplishment, there is a pragmatic balance of form and function in the project. The underlying garage is utilitarian while the overlapping exterior panel system provides shade and visual relief at various scales.

More from the architects on the origins of this bold approach: “Almost twenty years after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, this project is reinventing and re-affirmating Macedonia´s separable, undeniable and glorified national identity through urbanism and architecture. Macedonian culture is celebrated by a large number of memorials, religious symbols and new public buildings which are mostly designed in a historicist style. Neo-baroque is the favorite one, with its connotation of power and impact on the masses. The extensive use of these styles is supposed to establish Skopje as the European, Christian, bourgeois city that it has never really been – and to deny its oriental, Islamic as well as it socialist, modern past.”