Paraphrased by the Washington Post, architect Terence Riley puts Miami's parking garages at the literal forefront of local urbanism: "In a city where everyone drives, the parking garage is the foyer." After all, Riley's firm, K/R Architects, curated the design of one of the city's most flamboyant parkades: Museum Garage, in the Miami Design District, features six different firms responsible for different facades: WORKac's and J. Mayer H.'s are pictured below (the former's design is on the left, mostly in white, bending into the latter's on the right, where things get more colorful) along with Clavel Arquitectos, Nciolas Buffe, K/R Architects, and Sagmeister & Walsh.

Museum Garage is in good company. Miami has a ton of architecturally bold parking garages—1111 Lincoln Road by Herzog & de Meuron (the cover image here) cost $65 million to build and is home to a designer shop and a private penthouse for its developer. The New York Times called it "a piece of carchitecture that resembles a gigantic loft apartment, with exaggerated ceiling heights, wide-open 360-degree views and no exterior walls."

“One of the things about Miami Beach, even in the deco era, is, because it’s a resort town, architects were able to experiment,” Steve Pynes of Bermello Ajamil & Partners told the Post. “Maybe they feel freer to do something different.” One of these experiments is the Ballet Valet Parking Garage by Arquitectonica Geo, Arquitectonica's landscape division, which is encased in three different plant species, giving it the nickname Chia Garage (see below).

Even Gehry Partners is part of the parking garage scene: their Pennsyvania Avenue Garage (above) for the NWS Orchestral Academy has a facade of woven mesh panels, lit by colored LEDs. City View Garage by Leong Leong and IwamotoScott filters light through a spongey golden metal facade, while TEN Arquitectos' Park@420 extrudes it through square pores (below). And while its designs were rejected by the city, Zaha Hadid's parking structure for Miami Beach would have made for good company.

Slated for completion by the end of 2017 is Faulders Studio's facade for the Wynwood Parking Garage and Mixed-Use Building (see below), reinforcing the local street art-aesthetic of the local Arts District.

Check out more of Miami's garages in the gallery below.