Archinect - News

When a Parking Lot Is So Much More

2012-03-26T12:05:00-04:00

We need to redefine what we mean by “parking lot” to include something that not only allows a driver to park his car, but also offers a variety of other public uses, mitigates its effect on the environment and gives greater consideration to aesthetics and architectural context.

Taking Parking Lots Seriously, as Public Spaces

2012-01-06T14:19:00-05:00

One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”

Today is PARK(ing) Day 2011!

2011-09-16T15:07:07-04:00

Park(ing) Day is an international celebration of alternative street design, which started in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in downtown San Francisco. Now it's a worldwide phenomenon, and today New Yorkers will transform more than 30 boring parking spots into temporary parks.

Last year, PARK(ing) Day transformed 850 metered parking spots into temporary parks in 183 cities in 30 countries on 6 continents.

Parking spaces

2011-07-20T01:17:04-04:00

Simon Henley's new book, The Architecture of Parking (Thames & Hudson), casts an objective eye over car parks, one of the most important but most neglected building types of the modern era, and finds a strange and haunting beauty.

'Using formal expression to overcome any shortfall in the quality of construction' ... The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth, (above) designed by The Owen Luder Partnership.

Ground Level: One more good-looking garage in Santa Monica

2011-07-06T16:39:00-04:00

But the real show is outside, where the garage includes a number of large-scale public-art installations, including pieces by Anne Marie Karlsen (along 2nd Street) and L.A. firm Ball-Nogues Studio (along 4th Street). The Ball-Nogues piece, called “Cradle,” features hundreds of stainless-steel spheres suspended from one of the garage’s exterior walls. The design is open-ended enough to suggest both sea foam and a Newton’s Cradle...