Park life: Veronica Simpson considers car park design


Should car parks be written off as dinosaurs of a bygone, car-centric age, or can they be refurbished, repurposed or reinvented to become urban assets rather than eyesores? Veronica Simpson goes in search of answers, and unearths some surprisingly attractive and innovative solutions


Blueprint

Words Veronica Simpson

Urban car parks: surely they must be near the top of the list of least lovely of all possible structures - only slightly behind power stations, nuclear bunkers and Eighties shopping malls. Though magnificent examples do exist (the catacomb-like Parc des Celéstins in Lyon, for example), the vast majority are cheaply built, utilitarian in design, badly lit, and often poorly maintained. Collectively, they have failed to become what was envisaged for them in the mid-20th-century heyday of carcentric living and town planning - emblems of the machine age, temples to what then seemed our inevitable, utterly motorised future. Instead, they squat in their monumental concrete ugliness, inefficiently and inelegantly taking up valuable city-centre space, like the boorish guest who refuses to recognise the party is over. As the civic hearts of towns and cities are masterplanned towards a more sustainable, connective future in which public transport, cyclists and pedestrians are central, the modern car-park typology appears increasingly obsolete.

UN Studio’s Mercedes Benz museum: A double helix structure internally generates two descending pathways through the eight-storey building, offering multiple pathways connecting with offices, a museum shop and restaurant Photo credit: Brigida gonzalez, Courtesy UN studio

UN Studio's Mercedes Benz museum: A double helix structure internally generates two descending pathways through the eight-storey building, offering multiple pathways connecting with offices, a museum shop and restaurant Photo credit: Brigida gonzalez, Courtesy UN studio

Among architects they have their fans, however - purists or functionalists who appreciate them as the ultimate in streamlined construction, offering an exhilarating simplicity and rawness. UK architect Simon Henley of Henley Halebrown Rorrison (HHbR) makes a convincing case for their appreciation in his excellent book, The Architecture of Parking (Thames & Hudson, 2009). The only comprehensive international survey on this building type, it charts their evolution: from the comfortable 'liveried stables' of the early days (when cars were the playthings of the rich, driven and maintained by chauffeurs) through Louis Kahn's proposed cylindrical car 'ports' placed around the edges of futuristic city masterplans, to the proliferation of private-sector, rented-by-the-hour, anonymous car 'warehouses' of the latter half of the 20th century.

Ingenhoven Architects’ car park in Burda, Switzerland: ramps and bays are integrated into a circular, ascending race track veiled by slim, wooden louvers Courtesy Ingenhoven Architects

Ingenhoven Architects' car park in Burda, Switzerland: ramps and bays are integrated into a circular, ascending race track veiled by slim, wooden louvers Courtesy Ingenhoven Architects

Henley asserts: 'The multistorey car park is a stealthy architecture that has been tracing the zeitgeist for more than a century, projecting ideas of what is technically possible and what is emotionally interesting.' Emotionally interesting? Indeed. For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, there is now a new breed of car park that attempts to engage the emotions - to attract and even to delight the user.

Ingenhoven Architects’ car park in Burda, Switzerland: ramps and bays are integrated into a circular, ascending race track veiled by slim, wooden louvers Courtesy Ingenhoven Architects

In the past decade or so, a small but select group of architects - including OMA, MVRDV, Herzog & de Meuron, UN Studio, Zaha Hadid and NL Architects - have been exploring the formal and spatial possibilities of parking structures, resulting in some wonderfully sculptural spaces. Not a car park in the strictest sense, UN Studio's 2006 Mercedes-Benz Museum is more of a vehicular beauty parade: 160 iconic and historic car models spin around a central atrium in a building that places people at the centre of the experience.

It's obviously easier to remedy the claustrophobic environment of an above-ground car park. Ingenhoven Architects' 2002 car park in Burda, Switzerland is apparently a joy to experience: a circular race-track structure veiled by slim wooden louvres, which complements and embraces its leafy suburban setting. However, even the tomb-like confinement of an underground garage can be remedied, with the right creative mindset. OMA's underground car park in Breda city centre built in 2000 banishes dark corners, walls and slabs that could hide potential assailants. Daylight pours in through rooflights on the ground floor, while steel and glass patios punched through to the lower levels allow daylight to bounce off white ceilings and backlit perforated steel walls.

The clever use of graphics, lighting and materials at the Avenida Libertad Car Park in Spain won its designer, Manuel Clavel Rojo, a 2010 Tile of Spain Award Courtesy Clavel Arquitectos

The clever use of graphics, lighting and materials at the Avenida Libertad Car Park in Spain won its designer, Manuel Clavel Rojo, a 2010 Tile of Spain Award Courtesy Clavel Arquitectos

In the past decade, many architects have woken up to the potential of car-park exteriors and interiors as blank canvases, perfect for the deployment of dramatic lighting, materials and effects. For example, Zaha Hadid's 2001 Hoehnheim-Nord Terminus and Car Park in Strasbourg is conceived as a series of overlapping energetic fields, providing a dynamic interplay between the horizontal streaks of moving car headlights against slimline diagonal pillars and go-faster ceiling strip lights. Birmingham's Millennium Point Car Park, by Urban Design (now Acivico DCFM), is a beacon for regeneration in the city's Eastside: glowing Perspex sheets in Arctic Blue are scattered across the seven-storey facade; when lit up at night, it is visible for miles around. It won a European Car Park Award in 2012.

The clever use of graphics, lighting and materials at the Avenida Libertad Car Park in Spain won its designer, Manuel Clavel Rojo, a 2010 Tile of Spain Award Courtesy Clavel Arquitectos

Birmingham's Millennium Point and Sheffield's Charles Street car park, by Allies and Morrison, recently made it into the top 10 'coolest car parks in the world' in a competition organised by Stress-Free Airport Parking and Blueprint's sister title, FX magazine. The Charles Street car park in Sheffield, its surface animated by rotated aluminium panels painted green on the inside, also garnered two RIBA Awards in 2009 - one of few parking structures ever to do so.

Redressing the normally hostile visitor experience is a key feature of this new breed of car park, with colour-coded floors, lighting, clear graphics and digital gadgetry frequently deployed to help people navigate their way around - not to mention to assist them locating their car.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro helped designer David Rockwell reinvent a former parking garage in New York as a film centre, featuring a 27m-long glass front wall Courtesy The Rockwell Group

Where there's a well-heeled customer to attract, there is justification for investing in better quality finishes and features. For example, in BDP's Liverpool One multistorey car park, attached to Grosvenor Estate's £42bn Liverpool shopping centre, the environment is enhanced with coloured lights, crisp graphic treatments, polished concrete flooring, and a conical atrium entrance lobby that welcomes and orientates visitors (it won a European Parking Association Award in 2009). The 2010 Avenida Libertad Car Park in Murcia, south-east Spain, goes to even greater extremes, with a scheme more reminiscent of an edgy European nightclub than a parking facility - complete with exquisitely tiled customer toilets and supercool graphics.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro helped designer David Rockwell reinvent a former parking garage in New York as a film centre, featuring a 27m-long glass front wall Courtesy The Rockwell Group

Diller Scofidio + Renfro helped designer David Rockwell reinvent a former parking garage in New York as a film centre, featuring a 27m-long glass front wall Courtesy The Rockwell Group

The ultimate 'car park as campus asset' has to be Vancouver-based practice Bing Thom Architects (BTA)'s sleek, low-key, three-storey scheme for the South Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), commissioned to rationalise scattered parking across the campus into one spot and free up valuable land. Completed in 2011, this 35,000 sq m building is sunk into an existing hillside to minimise visibility and support the campus's full-sized playing field on its roof, leaving only the east and south sides of the parking lot fully visible. Glass pyramids articulate the staircase and entrance atria. But the real masterstroke is the pixilated, undulating metal facade that reflects light and cloudscapes across the Alberta prairie sky.

But in tune with a certain fashion for urban authenticity, there are now champions for even the grottiest, most run-down versions of the multistorey. For example, the hippest, hottest car-park experience in London since 2007 has been young gallerist Hannah Barry's Bold Tendencies, a summer arts and sculpture festival, which takes place on the top floors of a 10-storey Seventies' car park in the edgy urban environs of Peckham, south London. It is now a regular fixture in London's summer cultural scene, aided by Practice Architecture's rooftop restaurant Frank's Bar. Bold Tendencies' programming has become increasingly ambitious, with highlights including a 2011 performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (with a 100-piece youth orchestra gathered from London's music schools). As a model for low-cost, arts-led regeneration it has blazed a trail. Says Barry: 'There have been 12 university studies of this car park since it [Bold Tendencies] opened, from Kyoto to Canada.'

Hawkins\Brown used the car park under a first-floor office to create an aspirational shop front for learning for the London South Bank University Photo credit: Tim Crocker, courtesy Hawkins\Brown

Hawkins\Brown used the car park under a first-floor office to create an aspirational shop front for learning for the London South Bank University Photo credit: Tim Crocker, courtesy Hawkins\Brown

Miami went one better than Peckham in 2010, with Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 (referred to as 'eleven eleven') Lincoln Road - a parking structure that is also a permanent community asset. This beautifully simple concrete building has become a yearround destination, with yoga classes, parties and even weddings staged here regularly. With a fully open exterior (safety grilles are set back from the edge), the structure reads as a podium - an excitingly accessible frame providing vistas and perspectives from its upper storeys on to the surrounding cityscape. Circulation is through an open, sculptural stair in the centre of the building. The owner - developer and entrepreneur Robert Wennett - had his own private apartment built into the upper mezzanine floor levels, with a massive roof terrace. 'Lincoln Road is the centre of cultural and civic life in Miami Beach,' says Wennett, in Elizabeth Priore's short film about the project (vimeo.com/51889050). 'Everything that we do in the garage is not what you expect of a parking garage...This garage is all about the pedestrian.' (It deservedly won the aforementioned World's Coolest Car Park competition.)

Sadly, most of us - especially in Western Europe - are unlikely to see similarly engaging and flexible new parking schemes in our major cities, thanks in large part to prohibitively high land values and lack of year-round sunshine. So why not pull down the really ugly postwar ones and replace them? Simon Henley, the author and car park expert, explains that these, in particular, 'would be abnormally difficult to demolish. They are either standard precast or in-situ concrete. Older engineering tends to err on the clever side, so is significantly harder to dismantle.'

On top of a 10-storey car park in Peckham is Frank’s Bar, designed by Practice Architecture, using old scaffolding planks, ratchet straps and a red PVC canopy Photo credit: Richard Bryant, courtesy Hannah Barry Gallery

On top of a 10-storey car park in Peckham is Frank's Bar, designed by Practice Architecture, using old scaffolding planks, ratchet straps and a red PVC canopy Photo credit: Richard Bryant, courtesy Hannah Barry Gallery

Opportunities are also rare for reinvention, as the building plan is usually too deep and dark and the floor heights too low to work for commercial or residential uses. There are a few exceptions, however - most famously, the Eighties' conversion of Wallis Gilbert & Partners' Grade II listed art deco Daimler Car Hire garage in Fitzrovia into offices for advertising company McCann-Erickson, (now McCann London, and still there).

Two new and notable examples show that in some cases - where the intended usage or specific building layout allows - repurposing can work really well. In the summer of 2013, Hawkins\Brown converted a first-floor office with undercroft parking at London South Bank University (LSBU) into a vibrant two-storey student hub, whose entrance lobby takes advantage of the large volume afforded by its former incarnation as off-street parking for delivery vans and lorries. The original Seventies coffered concrete car-park ceiling is retained and creates a pleasing geometry within this social and learning hub.

In 2011, with the help of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, David Rockwell reinvented a former parking garage in New York as a state-of-the-art movie theatre. The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center features an eye-catching entrance with 27m-long glass wall, while the low ceiling and deep floorplates help to create a charming boutique feel to the screening rooms (one 90 seater and another 150 seater) and the cafe/restaurant.

Joho Architecture’s Herma car park in South Korea is designed to create ‘an art gallery-like parking building’ to raise the prestige and commercial value of ground-floor rental units Photo credit:  Sun Namgoong, Courtesy Joho Architects

Joho Architecture's Herma car park in South Korea is designed to create 'an art gallery-like parking building' to raise the prestige and commercial value of ground-floor rental units Photo credit: Sun Namgoong, Courtesy Joho Architects

So what does the future hold for car-park architecture? It depends on your part of the world. In the urban megacities of China and elsewhere in Asia we can expect to see more sprawling megamalls with giant car parks, though underground appears to be the fashionable choice (BDP is working on several InterIKEA shopping malls in China, one of which, in Beijing, has underground parking for 7000 cars).

There will be more sculptural and fantastical creations too - like Joho Architecture's Herma car park in South Korea. As with this version, there is a strong trend for new car parks having retail on the ground floor. It helps to justify greater investment in design, as well as improve and animate the street-level presence.

But for the vast majority of the Seventies and Eighties' relics we appear to be lumbered with, Simon Henley hopes that, at the very least, we can expect a lick of paint and some dramatic lighting - even music. Where most car parks are concerned, he concludes: 'They don't need to be that much better to be a lot better.'

See DesignCurial's pick of the world's 10 best-designed car parks








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