2009 Notable Projects: Parking
Vol.04 No.01

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Architypes’ Notable Projects
Architype finds inspiration in projects that somehow redefine our understanding of a certain typology.  Through good design, these architects created smart and forward thinking solutions to the particular constraints or challenges presented by each project.  Grouped together by type, they provide a survey of innovation taking place at several different scales, promoted by both large and small firms. Presented here in the words and images of their own creative team, the following projects also offer an index of ideas and solutions as well as creative people and products within the industry.

1111 Lincoln Road, Miami, Florida
Herzog & de Meuron | UIA Management LLC

Drawings: ©UIA Management LLC Drawings: ©Herzog & de Meuron

For project description and additional information visit: www.1111lincolnroad.com

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UCSF Mission Bay Parking Structure 23B, San Francisco, California
Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects Inc.

Photography: ©Tim Griffith Drawings: ©Stanley Saitowitz/Natoma Architects

Geometry means to “measure the earth,” and the science of geometry has always served to rationalize nature. For the ancients, it was the disk of the sun that inspired the circle. In Egypt, the four corners of the rising and setting sun at the summer and winter solstices marked the square mat of flat earth. In the Renaissance, the mechanics and proportions of the human body were translated into mathematical systems. Currently, knowledge of nature has evolved from the scale of the mechanical to the intricacies of the molecular, to subtle and complex mapping that has changed our under-standing of the nature of nature. It is this contemporary conception of order that this gateway parking structure expresses. Translucent channel glass arranged in DNA-derived patterns with open voids encloses the facades and provides ventilation for the parking, also conferring on the building a distinctive and memorable image. The glass has a stippled surface that radiates light, forming a shimmering veil around the concrete structure. At night, the channel glass is illuminated from within. On the south facade are photovoltaic panels arranged in the same patterns. These, along with photovoltaic panels on a trellis on the roof, generate energy for the building. This airy glass box of light is an entry and front door to the campus. The lobby is an eighty-five-foot void containing the elevator core and stairs. The structural system consists of precast columns eighty-five feet high. Sixty foot beams fit into haunches on the columns. The precast system supports poured-in-place floors. Paul Valéry claimed that it is the skin that is the deepest; this project is about a skin that provides an image protected from the building’s function.

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Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure, Santa Monica, California
Moore Ruble Yudell Architects and Planners

Photography: ©John Edward Linden Drawings: ©Moore Ruble Yudell

The design of the 300,000 SF parking structure establishes a strong presence within a cluster of civic buildings that includes the historic City Hall, Courthouse and Public Safety Building. The parking structure provides 882 parking spaces accommodated in six levels above grade and two below grade. A community meeting room on the fifth floor serves as an easily identifiable marker for the entire Civic Center while affording spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean and the city. A café on the main plaza terrace animates the pedestrian traffic flow. Pre-cast white, ribbed concrete panels are set in a rhythmic, variegated pattern on all façades, capturing and enhancing the rich play of shadows provided by the brilliant sunlight while screening the presence of parked cars. A series of bays made of channeled colored glass breaks down the scale of the structure and are set at varying sizes and angles to bring a light, luminous and ever-changing quality to the building. As they are lit up in the evening, their glow appears as a shimmering curtain.
The parking structure is the first LEED® certified building in the United States of its kind. Photovoltaic panels on the roof, east and west facades provide for all of the building’s energy needs, while the design uses elements such as canopies and the photovoltaic panels to facilitate self-shading to reduce heat islands. Materials with a high recycled content were used, including fly-ash replacement for cement, and recycled-content reinforcing steel and framing.

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Filter Park Parking, Chicago, Illinois
Leven Betts Architects

Drawings: ©Leven Betts Architects

Chicago Filter Park is the first-place winner of the 2003 Chicago Prize Competition for a thousand-car parking facility. Our proposal begins with three basic strategies: to reconsider the parking facility as part of a larger system of urban infrastructure; to challenge preconceptions of how a parking structure functions, both technologically and environmentally; and to change the way parking lots look.
Located on the northern edge of the competition site, the parking facility is composed of two thin linear structures of automated parking; between them runs a bridge and hanging tree garden, where pedestrians and cyclists can cross the Kennedy Expressway. This non-car access to the parking structure occurs on a series of ramping berms that invert the patterns of the expressway and its strips of highway and ramps. Automobile access occupies the slices between the berms. The ramping access to the parking garage reformulates the morphology of the highway by creating a functioning urban earthwork that provides for pedestrian inhabitation and filtering of automobile exhaust. Cyclists and pedestrians use the ramps as a means of access to and from the building, and a system of fans, filters, and vents cleans the air fouled by the cars waiting to be parked.
The scheme proposes a two-bar linear automated parking system in order to greatly reduce the physical impact on this urban site of a thousand-car parking structure and its related auto emissions. The elimination of vehicular ramps allows the building to be significantly less massive, just as the elimination of cars’ driving in circles in search of parking at rush hour reduces pollution in the building and surrounding area. Moreover, the structural system requires less material and erection time, thereby reducing costs. The net gain in square footage by using this automated system opens up the rest of the site for other green and public programs.
Promoting the idea that a parking facility can be a public building that includes other amenities, our scheme adds to the competition’s program a bus terminal at street level, bike-rental shop, tourist-information office, pedestrian/cyclist bridge at plaza level, and roof-garden café that overlooks the skyline from the top level. These additions to the given program expand the concept of an urban parking facility into an intermodal, informational, sustainable public amenity for the city of Chicago.
The layout of the parking is designed to maximize the filtering of light into the central bridge and garden space, as well as to expose the daily, weekly, and monthly cycle of use. By placing cars against a glass skin, the exterior and interior facades of the two parking structures act as an occupancy sign that changes depending on whether the garage is full or empty. Commuters on the Kennedy Expressway can easily see whether there is plenty of parking space or whether it is full, and pedestrians and cyclists can see the automated parking system in action as they travel on the bridge

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IAH Airport Parking Facility, Houston, Texas
EASTON+COMBS

Photography: ©Hiepler,Brunier Drawings: ©EASTON+COMBS

The parking facility for the Bush International Airport Houston is a private commercial extension of the airports infrastructure and economic fabric. The project functions as an intermodal link from automobile travel to the airport terminal.
During the last decade the Bush Intercontinental Airport Houston has expanded at an accelerated rate accommodating an ever growing culture of commercial air travel. In tandem with this development the surrounding rural landscape has developed into a transitional zone of commercial development and infrastructure responding directly to the economies of travel. As a virtual reciprocal action to the airports expansion, these transitional zones have seen layers of private commercial development respond to and feed from the airport as an economic magnet.
The IAH Airport Parking Facility is a direct programmatic response as a participant in this secondary economy of the transitional zone outlying the airports municipal boundaries. In this sense the project becomes part of the larger infrastructural condition of the airport and requires an architectural response which addresses multiple scales of landscape, physically and virtually, both at the scale of air travel, and at the scale of the commercial infrastructural landscape of the larger economic ecology of airport.
Two primary values of landscape and threshold express and reinforce the ritual of travel throughout the project. The volume of program dedicated to the housing of the automobile allows an architectural expression of landscape on a conceptual and figural level, both from the air and in the horizon. The open air structures propose an environment of over scaled waiting halls that dispatches and receives the traveler. The Administration Building operates at another scale to form the initial and final architectural threshold of travel, bringing the body, via the vehicle, into a pressured spatial relationship with the building through its 100 foot long linear cantilever.

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Bridges Education Center, Memphis, Tennessee
buildingstudio architects, LLC

Photography: ©Timothy Hursley Drawings: ©buildingstudio architects

The new facility, on the northern edge of downtown, is part of the revitalization of the City’s oldest neighborhood, Greenlaw, a recent run-down forgotten part of the community. When searching for a site Bridges chose this location to show their commitment for bettering the inner-city.
The owner requested a 53,000 SF design to evoke public interest in its program, a structure that would be progressive and distinctive in design. There was need for 120 on site parking spaces. To park the requested number of cars, over half the property would have had to be covered by asphalt, inevitably meaning a multi-storied “big-box” building sitting adjacent to its parking lot. The alternative was to use the single-story roof as parking. This overcame the typical suburban predicament and also provided controlled access to give those who use the building greater security.
Parking atop the building also caused the structure to spread out and hold the street edge, making it more urban. Parking on the roof also decreased the building height letting it stay low on the neighborhood sides, respecting the smaller homes that surround the new building.
Rooftop parking required an inclined ramp. This generated the building’s sloped form. Opposite from the parking ramp, there’s another contrasting slope to accommodate a 40 ft. high activities area for a climbing wall and high ropes course.
The building’s prime function is education and activities for elementary through high schoold students. Rather than designing an environment that might superficially appeal to kids, the approach was to let the building act as a teaching tool. To achieve this, the building’s environmental features are highlighted. The strategy is to show a visitor the impact that a building has on the environment and how it may be lessened by design.
Throughout the project there are elements that draw attention to this: rainwater retention areas, a 3,200 SF photovoltaic array, a solar water heater for the building’s hot water; operable windows in every habitable space, high ceilings with wide overhangs to the south. Natural light illuminates the interior work and activity spaces. Cellulose insulation and fly-ash concrete recycle waste material otherwise headed for the landfill. Native plants are used to reestablish the area’s biome. 
The overall tectonic quality of the facility is meant as a tacit teaching device. The building’s most prominent design feature is its hinged truss at the gathering area. Guy Nordenson and Associates designed an open steel frame along each elevation that is counterbalanced on a single fulcrum point. Translucent panels exposing the wall framing are used throughout, further underscoring the building’s structure.
The centerpiece of the facility is a 30 ft. high climbing wall and high ropes course surrounded on all sides by glass. The stepped lawn doubles as an informal outdoor amphitheater which seats a 1,000 people, permitting casual seating to watch a performance. The covered entry area’s monumental stairs convert to an impromptu stage.

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10 mile spiral: A Gateway to Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada
Aranda\ Lasch

Drawings: ©Aranda\ Lasch

The spiral is an obsessive shape: it spreads out endlessly while it curls toward a center that it never finds. Las Vegas is an obsessive city: it too spreads out endlessly, as the fastest growing city in America and new business capital of the west; yet it also curls toward a center, the strip and its entertainment/gaming complexes. Our submission for the Las Vegas Sign Competition, 10-Mile Spiral, serves two civic purposes for Las Vegas. First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device, spreading out the bumper-to-bumper traffic occurring on weekends along I-15, the interstate corridor that eventually becomes the famous Las Vegas Strip. It does so by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

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Children’s Hospital Parking Deck and Data Center, Birmingham, Alabama
GA Studio

Photography: ©Timothy Hursley Photography: ©Lewis Kennedy Photography: ©David Schiele Drawings: ©Giattina Fisher Aycock Architects

Program Summary: Project consisted of the first phase of parking and a data center for an urban hospital.  The site is located on the northern half of the block adjacent to the owner’s existing parking deck.  The eight-level post-tensioned concrete frame addition will eventually provide 1,100 additional parking spaces above 100,000sf of data center on two lower levels.  
Program Statement: Efficiency in structure and space are essential for a cost-effective parking deck.  Owners consider such buildings commodities.  A good architectural solution addresses these concerns and finds a way to meaningfully engage the urban fabric and its inhabitants.
The Owner asked the architect to design an 800-car parking deck addition with a data center on top.  Through a series of studies, the  design team convinced the client to invert the concept.  By utilizing the adjacent deck’s entry and ramps, the large parking volume of the addition was pushed up and away from the street, exposing the data center, generally embedded in a building’s interior, in a two-story bar of clear glass at the street front. Because of the massing limitations of a deck, the designers looked to materiality to further the building’s layering, to define the masses and their functions and to create a textural richness for the city.  The clear glass skin of the data center reveals the building’s structure and the functions it houses to the pedestrian.  
At upper floors, the design team worked to invent a cost-effective veil to neutralize the view of parked cars while still expressing the structure and its utilitarian functions.  After studying digital and full-scale mockups, the architects developed a regular 5’x5’ perforated steel panel module.  Each panel is anchored to a vertical galvanized mullion with four pegs.  Each peg varies in length and, when tightened with a bolt, creates a uniform deformation in each panel that attracts and reflects light.  The perforations make the panel virtually invisible from the inside and opaque from the outside.  At night, interior lights glow through the perforations adding new transparency to the skin.
In a profile that promises to grow into its context as the neighborhood grows around it, the glass box data center and the metal-clad deck offer city views to users and an ever-changing palette to passersby.  

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