One of the best features of a typical urban stone or brick building is that it’s adaptable. A former clothing store can become a bank, or apartments, or offices.
But what about parking garages? Can an underused parking garage be adapted to other uses in the future, or are we stuck with having to tear them down if we want something else? Can we even convert one or two floors into something else?
Although it’s been successful in some instances, David Sucher thinks you’re stuck with it.
Here are three necessities that he says are missing from most parking structures:
- “Adequate” headroom for a range of typical uses.
- Minimum ramps and maximum level floor plates as you don’t want to have to contend with a Guggenheim Museum ramp.
- “Adequate” floor loads as believe it or not cars are not that heavy.
I remember (vaguely) at some point going to some sort of flea market in a parking structure. I’m pretty sure it was her in Fort Wayne, but I was a little kid.
Otherwise, it’s racin’ bikes down them when they’re empty… or practicing your climbing attack pace when going up on the bike.
Thanks for the photo credit!
I think one of the main problems is, when we build parking structures we dedicate the entire building to parking. Fort Wayne has entire blocks that can only be used for parking. When we build parking structures we should at least dedicate the bottom floor to retail space, so as not to create large areas devoid of commercial space.
Along Wayne St. starting at the corner of Calhoun there is a parking garage. Across the street is the Wells Fargo Building with a parking structure next to it. This is a total of almost an entire block which can be used for nothing because of the parking garages. Unfortunately you also find this directly across the street from the Hilton Hotel. It makes it quite difficult to bring development downtown when some of the best real estate is taken up by huge parking structures.
I also think it would be far cheaper to just tear down the structures and build something else there.
of course they can be reused, but this is an(other) instance of site specificity and creative problem solving. some could be reused as farmer’s markets, some as skate parks, some as machining shops, others for artists’ studios…or a combination thereof. in fact, the art space idea might be ideal: good ventilation, indestructible architecture, expandable space, cheap overhead.
with flexible, open thinking, they could be re-imagined into all kinds of spaces.
who else needs shelter besides farmers and skate punks and art geeks?
the other question is this: how do we begin to create structures that are (intentionally, on the design end) flexible enough for future re-purposing?