What if parking garages could have a second life? Design firms like UltraBarrio and Gensler bet on it

2019-01-19T11:50:00-05:00

Even today, parking garages are typically underused. In the not-too-distant future, car shares, self-driving cars, increased investment in transit, or simple behavioral change could all shift the amount of parking people think they need. And the U.S. also has far more parking than necessary–in Seattle, for example, there are five parking spaces for every resident. Architects and city planners are increasingly realizing that valuable city space could be put to better use than storing cars.

Parking garages run rampant, especially in Los Angeles. According to Gensler's co-CEO Andy Cohen there are 500 million parking spaces in the United States. “Think about all that real estate, all that attention to parking, that could be revitalized and reused for the future of our cities.” Today parking garages house a vast amount of underutilized space. Over time, the need for parking garages will dwindle and parking spaces will have to find an alternative purpose. Architects and urban planners are working through ways in which these gigantic structures can be turned into useful alternatives to developing housing, office space, and other spaces of function.

Gensler is already in the works of transforming a part of Netflix's two-floor parking garage into new office space However, this isn't Gensler's first garage transformation. In Cincinnati, the architecture firm transformed 84.51's headquarters by converting 3 floo...

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What if parking garages could have a second life? Design firms like UltraBarrio and Gensler bet on it