Urban farms and communal spaces are among the ideas for repurposing car park floors in Melbourne’s skyscrapers in the future, when it is predicted that residents will rely more on driverless and shared electric cars.

The architects of Melbourne’s tallest building, Australia 108, have created designs envisioning the transformation of the building’s 10 levels of car parking into space for a vertical farm, beehives, water collection and storage, pet care, podcast studios, co-working and education. — The Age

A widespread over-supply of parking in metro Boston residential developments is driving up the cost of housing and may encourage people to own cars who otherwise would not, according to a new study by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. — CommonWealth

Harris County commissioners have chosen Houston-based Kirksey Architecture to design a project to retrofit the Astrodome by raising its floor and installing parking spaces underneath.
The $105 million project -- unveiled by county officials in September -- is the most recent attempt to secure the building's future. [...]

Many feared then that the world's first multi-purpose domed stadium for sporting events would face the wrecking ball. — Houston Chronicle

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

First, parking structures need to be used for longer periods of the day and for different purposes, both public and private. [...]

Second, parking structures need to be designed as flexible structures that can accommodate transitions from parking alone to a variety of other uses as parking ratios decline with further mixed-use development and increased use of shared parking facilities and transit. — urbanland.uli.org

Are you in a hurry to catch your flight and still need to find a parking place? Meet Ray, a shiny robot that parks your car at Düsseldorf Airport in Germany.

Ray makes sure you don’t have to park miles away from the terminal, eliminating the hassle of finding a parking place. Just drop off your car within a few meters from the check-in area [...]. When you come back from a holiday or business trip, the robot will make sure your car is ready to go when you walk out of the airport. — popupcity.net

A new parking garage in Nordhavn, Denmark by JAJA Architects will combine form, functionality, and fun. Draped in greenery and topped with a public playground, the aptly named Park and Play reimagines a garage as an active social space rather than simply a storage place for cars. [...]

The garage is being built as part of the first phase of Nordhavn’s almost 500-acre master plan to be developed over the next 40 to 50 years. — buildabetterburb.org

This automated garage is ideal for dense urban areas, says Yoka, vice president of program development at the International Parking Institute, based in Alexandria, Virginia. A Philadelphia-area native and self-described "super parking nerd," her niche is sustainable parking, something that many people, upon first hearing the phrase, assume is a contradiction. But for a building designed to house cars, says Yoka, The Lift at Juniper Street is surprisingly green. — citylab.com

We might ask ourselves the question, why is it that so many communities want to disguise the utilitarian cell phone tower as a fake tree? They fool no one and actually call more attention to them. Or why are there hundreds of parking structures that have false façades that make people initially think they are foreclosed buildings with all the windows broken? There seems to be much cultural confusion about the beauty of the utilitarian. — buildabetterburb.org

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. — nytimes.com

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. — guardian