A single house under construction in America today faces all kinds of problems, starting with a run on lumber, then bricklayers in demand, subcontractors with Covid, appliances on back order and plumbing fixtures out at sea. [...]

The home-building industry is having the most difficult time in decades meeting demand, the sum of many pandemic complications. But this moment reaches peak absurdity with garage doors. — The New York Times

Miami’s newest wave of designs could be its most ambitious yet.

Fitting for a place that cherishes A-listers, virtually every celebrity architect in the world, and many rising stars, have built there in the last decade. The big names include Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & De Meuron, Grimshaw, César Pelli, Richard Meier, Arquitectonica, Rafael Moneo, Jean Nouvel and Bjarke Ingels. The impressive results are scattered citywide, from Miami Beach to the thriving Design District. — The New York Times

It’s hard to escape the irony that the U.S., which will need something like 43 million new housing units to keep up with population growth in the next 35 years, is using space to build apartment-size garages, even as trends in ride-sharing and self-driving cars cast a measure of uncertainty on American car culture. — Bloomberg

The average price of building a garage parking space (as much as $34,000 in 2012) is passed on to people whether they own a car or not, and distort the true demand for urban parking. — Quartz

LMN Architects [...] wants the tower to survive 50 to 100 years. “If that’s the case, we do need to make sure—I feel we do have have the responsibility—that if the parking uses do change, we design to be able to adapt to that change,” [...] the coming transformation to a car-free-ish future. With rideshare, bikeshare, carshare, increasing transit options, and fully automated vehicles on the horizon, cities are less eager to allocate precious space for empty, parked cars. — wired.com

The design is relatively straightforward and free of OMA’s usual quirky structural tricks, once you get past the sliding entrance portals. Plywood-lined steps...lead you to an educational area, where visitors can explore the Garage digital archive, and back down the terraced levels of a bookshop. Up on the main gallery floor, there’s a big open space, currently filled with ping-pong antics...When the building is finally completed in [Sept.], a big red staircase will lead up to an open roof-deck. — The Guardian

A new development, 42 Crosby Street, is pushing the limits of New York City real estate to new heights with 10 underground parking spots that will cost more per square foot than the apartments being sold upstairs.

At $250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is $217,800, according to Zillow. — New York Times

Earlier this week, we featured the urban square design GENK C-m!ne by Dutch landscape and urban design firm HOSPER. Here's another project by them we really enjoyed: an almost 8,000 square foot ornamental pond on top of an underground parking garage which rivals any James Bond supervillan lair. The fascinating garage entrance, which has won multiple design awards, is part of the larger urban and landscape master plan HOSPER drew up for the land of the historic Hageveld Estate, near Amsterdam. — bustler.net

Garages, of course, hold a storied place in Silicon Valley lore. Think Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG), which all started in garages.
The start-up garage is a powerful symbol of the do-it-yourself underdog, and the creative, collaborative and scrappy culture they hope to reinforce through the renovation of the 57-acre former Sun Microsystems campus and new construction on an adjacent 22-acre parcel over the next few years. — MercuryNews