While most cities around the world seek to implement more sustainable and environmentally friendly modes of transportation, encouraging new urban mobility habits in their residents, the use of automobiles still persists, occupying significant parking spaces in urban centers. Finding a way to integrate these uses, provide new spaces for their citizens, and leverage their facilities for ecological, productive, and other purposes is the challenge faced by many professionals in architecture and urban planning.
There are economic, social, and cultural factors that influence the determination of the uses a space will acquire based on the needs of its population and the context in which it is implemented, among other reasons. Understanding the role of parking facilities in the city and the territorial dynamics revolving around them is part of the design process and the decision-making of professionals who will determine how to plan and organize these spaces in order to achieve the well-being and comfort of their users.
Beyond the technical, traffic-related, and functional aspects that must be considered when designing parking facilities, the act of incorporating gathering places, leisure, and recreational spaces for the public, adapting their structures for new uses, or conforming them to the natural conditions of the terrain. To reduce their impact on the environment are some of the strategies that lead to efforts in reusing, readapting, transforming, or revitalizing these spaces that occupy vast portions of land and are far from becoming obsolete.
The use of Rooftops as Public Spaces
Similar to how MVRDV has developed its catalog for reusing building rooftops, you can find various cases where parking lot roofs are utilized for projects that can serve as references. These projects encompass everything from public spaces for various recreational activities to the integration of natural environments in close contact with nature.
Parking in the Huertas de Caldes / Ravetllat-Ribas
- Location: Spain
- Year: 2019
"The proposal highlights the topography characteristic of the place. The morphology of the Orchards responds to the erosion created by the river course of Caldes’ river. The torrent is located some twenty meters below city level resulting in a series of platforms and stripes of farming belts used as particular orchards that make contact with the town. The new parking will insert itself in this logic of platforms and become another terrace. That’s why a green roof is proposed, continuing in a more urban and educative way, with similar plantations to the ones already there. It was the aim to establish a better connection path between the new garden and the Church Square, establishing an itinerary that runs parallel to the orchards’ limit."
Learn more about the project here.
Park ‘n’ Play / JAJA Architects
- Location: Denmark
- Year: 2016
"Parking houses should be an integral part of the city. But how can we challenge the monofunctional use of the conventional parking house? How do we create a functional parking structure, which is also an attractive public space? And how do we create a large parking house that respects the scale, history and future urban culture of the new development area Nordhavn in Copenhagen? The starting point for the competition project was a conventional parking house structure. The task was to create an attractive green façade and a concept that would encourage people to use the rooftop."
Learn more about the project here.
Parkdeck Hohenzollernhöfe / Architekten Stein Hemmes Wirtz
- Location: Germany
- Year: 2015
"Like a ground-level rooftop landscape, the parking platform stands out from the inner courtyard of the historic Hohenzollernhöfe building complex. The partially open parking ramps spiral downward across three levels. There are 113 parking spaces with natural light, ventilation, and access available for Hohenzollernhöfe residents. The slightly sloped green roof of the parking terrace invites residents to play, stroll, or sunbathe."
Learn more about the project here.
The Parking Garage that Moonlights as a Sledding Slope / White Arkitekter + Henning Larsen Architects
- Location: Sweden
- Year: 2015
"The five-storey parking garage accommodates 228 new parking spaces but it is its other functions that became the talk of the town. During the summer it serves as a popular meeting place with lush greenery and flowers planted on the hill. The slope is designed as an amphitheater where people can enjoy the evening sun. It has already been used for music events, for instance. But as the snow falls, it becomes a slope that delights children and adults with a sledge or a cup of warm chocolate on the staircase."
Learn more about the project here.
Urban Link / VAUMM
- Location: Spain
- Year: 2014
"The intervention, beyond resolving parking, the function which motivates the project, is also conceived as an opportunity to generate an infrastructure that meets together total accessibility of the neighborhood, providing new public spaces, parks, and leisure areas.
The program of 111 parking spaces is divided into two buildings with two towers of panoramic elevators; one elevator for each building and two large urban squares as decks.
[...]The deck surfaces have different surface treatments according to their use, with hard pavement areas coexisting with large green areas. Green roofs return the original green spaces occupied by the building and introduce nature in a highly densified urban environment."
Learn more about the project here.
What Happens Beneath Urban Squares and Parks?
The underground level offers ample opportunities for developing architectural interventions while considering the characteristics of the surrounding context and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages at the project, technological, and construction levels. How can we harness the natural conditions of the environment to combine different uses that can take place simultaneously? Beneath certain urban squares and parks, we discover various projects conceived to minimize their impact on the ground they are inserted into, engaging in dialogue with the public spaces that surround them and enabling the free interaction of each of their users.
Magok Central Plaza / Wooridongin Architects
- Location: South Korea
- Year: 2019
"The square is a flexible urban space able to accommodate these services, by responding to the movement of people in the surroundings rather than delivering a fixed program. The 60-meter diameter sunken square is built at the junction of the three stations, weaving the surface and underground levels along the exits of the station, creating a spatial experience. The open square can accommodate various activities such as events, performances, and exhibitions."
Learn more about the project here.
Underground Parking Katwijk aan Zee / Royal HaskoningDHV
- Location: Netherlands
- Year: 2016
"The architectural design of the parking garage builds forth on the design of the public space, developed by OKRA landscape architects, and respects and adheres to its conditions. The result is that the underground parking is carefully embedded into its natural dune environment. These man‐shaped dunes, which are shaped organically to create subtle entrances and exits, not only ensure that the character of the dunes stays intact, it also let natural daylight flow into the underground parking garage, benefitting the orientation within the long, elongated parking garage. The design also ensures that the colors and materials used, fuse seamlessly into the urban fabric of Katwijk aan Zee and its characteristic dune landscape. In the evening, the entrances and exits of the underground parking, light up with different colors to become beacons along the coast."
Learn more about the project here.
Shenkeng Children's Playground / LRH Architect & Associates
- Location: Taiwan
- Year: 2015
"The project is not only a design project for a child care center, and an underground parking lot and park, but also an example of holistic thinking.
After a lengthy public hearing and intense discussion, this project integrated different opinions from the local and public sectors; considered various elements including landscape, construction, transportation, industry, population, and festive composition; and provided seemingly opposite alternative options--gradually forming a consensus."
Learn more about the project here.
D. Diogo de Menezes Square / Miguel Arruda Arquitectos Associados
- Location: Portugal
"The exterior treatment plan of the parking lot in square D. Diogo de Menezes in Cascais, is projected as a roof surface platform with volumes that connect with the interior of the underground parking.
[...] To achieve the maximum polyvalence of its uses, the pavement square infrastructure is prepared to answer with energetic networks and water supply gathering the necessary conditions that a public space with such characteristics requires."
Learn more about the project here.
The Reconversion of uses as a form of Revitalization
On numerous occasions, parking facilities often end up as obsolete structures, abandoned, or even isolated within urban centers where other activities and functions have taken place over time. Projects like the Paseo Gigena in Buenos Aires, which is still under construction, can be analyzed to understand how this use can adapt to the new requirements demanded by cities while considering the current needs of their citizens and future planning.
Bicycle Parking Main Station Karlsruhe / TAFKAL
- Location: Germany
- Year: 2018
"Winds of change – turning a parking garage into a biking garage. Reuse of a car parking garage at the main station of Karlsruhe, Germany, into a garage for biking commuters. The Area south of the main station of Karlsruhe has been abandoned for many years now. In the early nineties, Rem Koolhaas had the commission for his first major building, the to-be-internationally-renowned ZKM, a museum for digital art and media. But, after years of discussing and arguing, the city of Karlsruhe pulled back from the project and opened the ZKM at another spot – without Rem. For the past 25 years, the area was reserved for cars and busses, adding the needed infrastructure for individuals coming to the main station.
In the spring of 2017, things started to change. An investor developed plans for the empty plot, and not soon after, the parking spots had to move due to the construction works. The city of Karlsruhe decided that this would be a one-time-chance to set a signal to its community: Karlsruhe would quit its outdated, car-friendly infrastructure, pushing the share of biking towards the mark of 30% of the total traffic in the city. While the biggest parking yard is being removed, the City of Karlsruhe did not concentrate on new space for cars. Instead, it invested in the most modern garage, for bikes only."
Learn more about the project here.
World of Food / Harvey Otten + Ted Schulten
- Location: Netherlands
- Year: 2015
"World of Food creates a new stage in the renewal of Amsterdam Southeast. It is an exotic food market in a spectacularly transformed old garage. Armenian, Egyptian, and Liberian specialties are served next to the best dishes of Thai, Caribbean, and Indonesian cuisine. Even a McDrive, a student pub, and an Italian espresso-corner are present.
Architects Ted Schulten and Harvey Otten took the initiative to accommodate this long long-cherished wish of the local authorities. Together with developer Lingotto an abandoned parking garage is transformed."
Learn more about the project here.
* The texts of each project are the descriptions sent by the authors themselves.
