Parts by Ed Ruscha gives more building than most of the Archi-Props works — a full corner view of a white commercial structure, seen from a slight angle that reveals both the front facade and the side wall, PARTS lettered in bold block capitals across the fascia above a large display window. A door sits to the left, the interior visible as a soft grey-white through the glass. The structure is clean and well-maintained, the geometry precise, the whole image rendered in warm grey tones against a pale ground. This is not a building in decline. It is a building in use.

An auto parts store is the infrastructure behind the infrastructure — the place that keeps everything else running. Where Mufflers deals in a specific repair, Parts deals in the general supply of components: the inventory of replaceable elements that allows cars, and by extension the entire automotive culture of Los Angeles, to continue functioning. The word itself operates at a level of abstraction that the other Archi-Props words do not quite reach — TIRES names a product, MUFFLERS names a component, UPHOLSTERY names a trade, but PARTS names a category, the entire class of replaceable things that any mechanical system requires.

Ruscha had been circling the automotive landscape of California since the mid-1950s, and the Archi-Props series represents his most systematic catalogue of its supporting architecture — the businesses that the car made necessary and that the car's continued existence sustained. Parts sits near the end of that series chronologically, produced in 1997 in an edition of twenty, and it is among the most formally complete of the group: a building that fills the frame with genuine three-dimensional presence, the corner construction giving the image a solidity that the cropped facades of Tires and Mufflers deliberately avoid. The word PARTS above the window is both identification and, viewed from a certain angle, description of what Ruscha had spent thirty years collecting — the parts of a landscape, assembled one building at a time.

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