1111 Lincoln Road, Miami: If there was ever a parking garage that perfectly represented its location, it's this one. The famous Swiss architects at Herzog de Meuron have created the perfect South Beach car park: showy, glamorous, and open to the humid, Floridian air. 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami knows it's beautiful. We don't mind looking.

Photo courtesy of Forgemind Archimedia

Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, London: Deep in South London, Peckham is being called the city's trendiest new neighborhood. This parking garage helps its cred with a cutting-edge gallery, rooftop pop-up bar, and temporary art installations. It brings all the hipsters to the yard.

Photo courtesy of Loz Pycock

Millennium Point, Birmingham: Ever seen a glow-in-the-dark parking garage before? From the outside, you'd think the sleek, geometric Millennium Point was a stylish hotel or modern art museum, but no: this neon-lit structure from British firm Grimshaw Architects (also behind the Queens Museum of Art, NYC) is a parking garage. An excessively cool one, mind you.

Photo courtesy of Elliott Brown

Miami Ballet Valet Parking Garage: Parking garages often epitomize the charmless, Brutalist architecture of the 1960s, but this one couldn't be more different: wreathed in plants, the Miami Ballet Valet Parking Garage's living walls make it warm and inviting instead of cold and forbidding.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Pessar

Michigan Theatre, Detroit: One of the most striking relics of old Detroit is the Michigan Theatre – with its soaring, fresco-covered ceiling suspended above the parking lot below, the space combines ornate beauty with functionality. The twist: it stands on the site of Henry Ford's original garage.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Sneddon

Autostadt, Wolfsburg, Germany: Autostadt, which is owned by Volkswagen (and looks like something out of Minority Report) houses nearly 1,000 cars, each of which occupies its own futuristic pod. Watch as giant robotic arms transport vehicles down to their waiting owners.

Photo courtesy of Rolf Werner-Imhoff

Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure: Leave it to crunchy granola California to come up with a parking garage that's as green as it is car-friendly. Overseen by the Moore Ruble Yudell architectural firm, the garage is LEED-certified. Solar panels soak up energy, and there are even electric car outlets. With its rainbow-hued exterior, it's a certified beaut.

Photo courtesy of Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners/International Parking Design, © John Edward Linden

Kansas City Library Parking Garage: If you're a library, how better to decorate your parking garage than as a friendly, colorful bookshelf, complete with giant book spines? Just don't be intimidated by the 20-foot tall version of A Tale of Two Cities.

Photo courtesy of Tim Samoff

Mission Bay Block 27, San Francisco: San Francisco is the reigning tech capital of the world, so no wonder that its buildings are following suit: consider the brilliant white, geometric Mission Bay Block 27 the parking garage equivalent of an iPhone.

Photo courtesy of Ethan Kan

Parc des Celestins, Lyon, France: Parking garage or surrealist dream? Viewers on each of the Parc des Celestin's seven stories can peek into its central, cylindrical airshaft, where a disco ball-like mirror rotates slowly. Casting glittering beams of light, it makes beautiful what would otherwise be mundane.

Photo courtesy of Gimli_36