Parking Garages become Architectural Stars

Posted on | January 25, 2012 | No Comments

South Beach in Miami Beach offers a beautiful coastline and Art Deco skyline, but it’s becoming known for its cutting-edge design of … garages.  Among the architectural stars are ADD Inc’s Miami projects in South Florida which include the Shelborne South Beach; Miami’s first high intelligence robotic parking garage at 1826 Collins Avenue featuring Boomerang System’s RoboticValet™.

Read how some of the best-known architects in the world are designing car parks that redefine the drab bunkers of old.

Zaha Hadid, the celebrated London-based architect known for her sinuous designs, has created dazzling museums, concert halls and railway stations across the globe. So what has she decided to tackle next? A municipal parking garage in Miami Beach. Some of the best-known architects in the world are designing car parks that redefine the drab bunkers of old.

“I’ve always been fascinated by garages,” Ms. Hadid says. “I’ve always liked this idea of bringing the street into a building and making that into an urban space.”

She has company. Miami Beach has become a magnet for high-end architects’ intent on rethinking what the often drab, utilitarian parking garage can be. In 2010, Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron completed a towering, airy parking structure in the heart of South Beach that has won international acclaim. Seven blocks east, Frank Gehry created, as part of his New World Center concert hall, a steel-mesh garage that is illuminated at night by multicolored LED lights. A few blocks south sits Mexican architect Enrique Norten’s recently finished garage, featuring a taut, white concrete façade pocked with perforations like a punch card.

Next up: Ms. Hadid’s $12.5 million, city-financed garage in South Beach’s Collins Park neighborhood; a parking and retail complex by Miami-based firm Arquitectonica in the Sunset Harbour neighborhood; and a planned development near the beach by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, that is expected to include a parking garage, possibly topped by a restaurant.

South Beach is also slated for three new automated parking garages designed by ADD Inc Miami that are believed to be the first of their kind in Florida.  After drivers drop off their cars in a bay, thin robotic platforms will slide underneath, lift them up and whisk them away to a parking spot.

Imaginative new garages are cropping up elsewhere. The Santa Monica Civic Center parking structure in California is clad in brightly colored panels, and Chicago’s Greenway Self Park is touted as an “earth-friendly” facility with energy-generating wind turbines.

For drivers, the normally humdrum experience of parking gets a dash of flair. Simón Parra, a part-time resident of the city, refuses to park his black Chevy Suburban anywhere but the Herzog & de Meuron garage at 1111 Lincoln Road. “It’s a work of art more than a garage,” he says. “Everywhere you look, there’s a view.”

Adapted from Wall Street Journal

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