From Eyesore to

Icon

The snazzy parking garage at

1111 Lincoln Road in Miami
Beach, Florida, includes an event
space. Its developer, art collector
Robert Wennett, wanted special
touches such as a handmade
bench (opposite).

Elegant and exciting? Yes,

a few new parking garages are going in that direction. By Jeffrey Spivak

Once upon a time, parking garages were architecturally elegant and stylish. This was way back in the first decades of the auto age. Early downtown
garages were designed to blend in with the office buildings around them, with facades
featuring doors, windows, arches, terra cotta trim, and ornamental stonework. Their
appearance mattered because back
then drivers pulled in, left their cars
with a valet, then strolled outside
past the building to their destinations.

trans
porta
tion

All that changed as valets gave way to

self-parking and cities had to accommodate
more automobiles. Garages became strictly
functional and utilitarian, a building type
stuck in a rut: squat, low, and rectilinear,
with horizontal slabs open to the air on all
sides and a facade that looked like a cold,
unsmiling face. Garages were sterile and
desolate, prompting urban theorist Jane Jacobs to say, The more downtown is broken
up and interspersed with parking lots and
garages, the duller and deader it becomes.
Fast forward to the current century.
Some public and private developers have
started demanding more attractive parking structures, and as a result, architecture
has rediscovered the parking garage. In diverse places ranging from Miami Beach to
Oklahoma City, and from the small town of
Columbus, Indiana, to the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica, well-known architects
have been designing garages with sculpture-like skins, cascades of colored lights,
walls of green plants, even a new twist on
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Planning May/June 2013

Above photo by Alberto Tamargo; right photo by Michael McElroy/New York Times

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Chicagos Greenway Self Park Garage (top) won the 2011 International Parking Institute
excellence award for architectural achievement. Bottom: Santa Monicas Civic Center parking
structure aimed at becoming the nations first LEED-certified garage.

the traditional wall-less, open-air form.

In the process, something improbable
has happened: A few exotic garages have
become community icons, attracting sight 20

Planning May/June 2013

seers, photographers, even event planners.

There are some amazing garages out
there, says Shannon Sanders McDonald,
who wrote a history of parking garage de-

Dazzling designs
The universe of dazzling garage designs is
still quite small. Nationwide, just a dozen
artistically acclaimed structures have been
built since 2008. Interestingly, about half
of these projects have been done by private
developers and half by city governments.
Florida is in the vanguard, with Miami
Beach at the epicenter of this new architectural niche. Four new-style structures have
opened there in the last three years and another is under development.
Architect Frank Gehry, as part of his
New World Center concert hall, added
a steel-mesh garage thats illuminated at
night by multicolored LED lights. For the
Park@420 retail center, Mexican architect
Enrique Nortens white concrete garage facade was covered with perforated holes in
Braille-looking patterns. Miami-based Arquitectonica wrapped the four-story Sunset Harbour garage with silver- and graycolored metal panels in trapezoidal shapes
resembling an angled checkerboard.
Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron created
an open-air, concrete-slab garage at 1111
Lincoln Road thats become a destination
because of its sculptural appearance and
sight lines, with triangular vertical columns, horizontal slabs varying in height
from eight to 34 feet, glass-walled boutiques
and restaurants, and a soaring seventh floor
parking level that is rented out as event
space. This garage draws fashion shows,
commercial shoots, concerts, celebrity parties, even weddings.
In the latest project, for the citys Collins
Park garage, London-based architect Zaha

Top left photo courtesy Steve HallHedrich Blessing; bottom left photo by Amy Williams Photography; right photos by Scott McDonaldHedrich Blessing

sign in 2007 and is an assistant architecture

professor at Southern Illinois University.
Its a trend that restarted with people wanting the garage to have an identity and character as part of the visitor experience. Its
really the garage to the level of art.
The artistry of some new garages reflects
an increasing interest in parking aesthetics
generally.
Garage owners and developers are
definitely paying more attention to the aesthetics of facilities today, says Casey Jones,
director of parking services at Boise State
University in Idaho and chairman of the
International Parking Institute, an industry
association that honors the best new facilities with annual design awards. The welldesigned, pleasing-to-look-at facility is becoming more the norm.

In Oklahoma City, stainless steel and translucent

mesh help make Chesapeake Energys parking garage
something special. The building covers an entire city
block, but it seems less massive because of shifting
colors on the facade.

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Green, gold, and silver

Imaginative garage designs are popping up
in some unexpected places, too.
In Columbus, Indiana, the citys new
four-story garage for a corporate headquarters features two sides with green walls
vine planters that will grow ivy over the facade, replicating Miami Beachs first exotic
parking structure, the Ballet Valet, which
was completed in 1996 and is known as the
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Planning May/June 2013

chia pet because its covered in greenery.

In Santa Monica, California, the Civic
Center garage has vertical colored glass slats
in blue, green, and red that are lit at night,
providing a mosaic of colors. In Oklahoma City, Elliott + Associates Architects
wrapped Chesapeake Energys four-story
garage in a stainless steel translucent mesh
skin that turns alternately gold, purple, yellow, and blue based on the angle of the sun
during the day. It won a 2010 International
Parking Institute design award.
Elsewhere, Jonathan Park Architects
draped Sarasota, Floridas Palm Avenue
garage in perforated aluminum sheets that
bow outward at different angles, resembling
the curvaceous wind-filled sails of a ship.
Chicagos HOK-designed Greenway Self
Park is eco-friendly, incorporating corkscrew-shaped wind turbines in one exterior
corner that rise more than 11 stories and
power the outside lights.
And in San Francisco, the exterior of
the Mission Bay Medical Center garage is
adorned with vertical aluminum slats that
are turned at different angles, producing a
monochromatic quilt of earth tones in light
and dark horizontal patterns.
Higher costs
Doing these types of projects takes a spe-

New debates
Parking is now sparking new debatesnot
whether to build it, but how to make it more
attractive.
In Cincinnati, a proposed city garage to
serve downtown office workers and a new
hotel has been delayed for years because of
criticism about its design. A city planning
commissioner said the initial design looks
like a jail, and a subsequent design was

Photos by Scott McDonaldHedrich Blessing

Hadida Pritzker Prize winneris planning a series of circular decks stacked like
pancakes, only with dissimilar shapes.
Miami Beach, a series of islands with a
population of 90,000 off the eastern coast of
Miami, has a long history of iconic design.
While famous for its glitzy nightlife, the city
also has 10 historic districts and one of the
largest collections of Art Deco buildings in
the world. The citys devotion to design even
extends to sewer pumping stations, some of
which incorporate sculptures and decorative landscaping.
Were fortunate to have that heritage of
taking our liabilities and turning them into
assets, says William Cary, Miami Beachs
assistant planning director. Every parking
garage is custom designed, so they become
a valuable part of our urban fabric rather
than an egregious addition.

Two views of Miami Beachs

planned Collins Park garage,
designed by Zaha Hadid
Architects.

Photo courtesy International Parking Institute

The U.S. Department of Energys National Renewable Energy Laboratory parking structure in
Golden, Colorado, has won a 2013 International Parking Institute excellence award.

cial commitment, because high-concept

structures cost more. For garages, the median construction cost per parking space
was $16,000 in 2010, according to the International Parking Institute, but some of
the dazzling and imaginative facilities in
recent years have cost more than $30,000
per space. Miami Beachs planned Collins
Park garage currently has an $18.5 million
budget for 489 spaces, or more than $37,000
per space.
Real estate developers and the city
government in Miami Beach can be more
cutting-edge because they can charge more
for parking, especially at modish structures.
The garage at 1111 Lincoln Road charges
$4 an hour, four times the rate of most cityowned garages in Miami Beach. But in most
other cities building an exotic garage usually takes an owner who wants one and is
willing to pay.
In Oklahoma City, Chesapeake Energy
wanted a building that was unrecognizable
as a garage. In Columbus, Indianawhich
has a population of only 44,000 but a long
tradition of commissioning buildings from
top architects like Eero Saarinen and I.M.
Peithe parking garage architects initially
presented the city with a plain traditional
design, but city leaders demanded something better looking.
Likewise, in Santa Monica, the citys initial criterion was a straight-forward garage,
but city leaders later pushed for something
artistic. This garage cost $29 million, or almost $33,000 per parking space.
The city became really enamored with
this becoming a real landmark building,
says Don Marks, president of Californiabased International Parking Design, the architect of Santa Monicas garage with Moore
Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners. Very
rarely do we get an owner who comes to
us and says, I want this to be a landmark
building. But were seeing a lot more owners who are interested in aesthetics than 20
years ago.

slammed for looking too much

like neighboring buildings.
In Knoxville, Tennessee, a
partnership of government agencies is developing a new six- or
seven-story garage to aid downtown revitalization efforts, and
some downtown boosters have
pleaded for a facility with retail or
other uses, so it doesnt become
an unused canyon, in the words
of one booster.
Most people want something thats attractive and
doesnt just look like a concrete
parking garage, says Christi
Branscom, Knoxvilles public
works director, who oversees
planning and zoning operations. Theres continued interest in not having a dead zone downtown.
The community is engaged, and they want
this to be as unique and interesting and
alive as possible.
Parking garage architects say a few factors are leading to better garage designs.
For one thing, more garages are incorporating mixed uses, by adding stores and
restaurants, and developers dont want
customers first impressions to be of some
ugly, generic facade. For another thing,
some city planning departments and some
institutions such as universities have been
creating design standards for buildings,
including garages, within special districts.
Miami Beachs zoning code requires new
garages facing a street or waterway to have
commercial or residential space on the first
floor, thus ensuring that garages are part of
a mixed use development.
All this is forcing better buildings and
higher concept designs, says Steve Rebora,
president of Desman Associates, a national
architecture and planning firm specializing
in parking. You cant come in with a vanilla
design anymore. n
Jeffrey Spivak is a senior research analyst at HNTB
Corporation, a Kansas City, Missouri-based architecture
and engineering firm. He also is a freelance writer
who specializes in planning, design, and real estate
development issues.

R e s o u r c e s
More The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form, Shannon Sanders
McDonald, (Urban Land Institute, 2007); International Parking Institute, which
holds annual design contests and publishes The Parking Professional magazine:
www.parking.org; Miami Beachs 1111 Lincoln Road event-destination garage:
www.1111lincolnroad.com; A 2010 National Building Museum exhibition on the
history of parking garages: www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions
/house-of-cars.html; According to the International Parking Institutes 2011
Emerging Trends in Parking report, an increasing demand for green and sustainable
parking solutions is a leading industry trend. Todays parking garages may be built
with local and recycled materials and include solar or wind power sources, biofuels,
and hydrogen fuel cells. www.parking.org/knowledge-center/sustainability.aspx.

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