02 January 2008

Ideas for a World-Class City, no.4

Can a parking garage be one of the coolest structures in a city? It can if it's something like this one.

Or this one.

It's expensive technology, no question. But as urban real estate becomes more precious, things like this begin to make sense. Decreasing the area used for parking garages (and worse, surface lots) makes land available for more worthwhile options. It certainly makes sense (or it will, eventually) to extend garages vertically instead of horizontally.

2 comments:

Radarman said...

Such a garage was an original part of the Carew Tower complex. It was in the center of the block and as tall as the hotel, but it was torn down in the nineteen eighties, having ceased to be used years before. I don't know whether it didn't work well or didn't work at all. There was also a a futuristic small open-sided parkomat on Ninth near Vine. It burned.

WestEnder said...

That's interesting. I wonder what kind of parking facilities the Millennium Tower will have.