The World's 18 Strangest Parking Garages

The World's 18 Strangest Parking Garages

By: Popular Mechanics 

Parking garages are often architectural afterthoughts. Monolithic and utilitarian, they rarely offer more than the necessary housing of cars for other more aesthetic structures. "It's an expense a developer generally doesn't like, but it is a necessary evil to make his development successful," says Len Tsupros, president of Carl Walker Construction, a design firm that specializes in parking garages. However, as cities become larger and as transportation technology changes, the role and function of the parking garage has to be redefined. Here are some of the world's most interesting, innovative and just plain bizarre parking garages.

Car Silos at the Autostadt
Location: Wolfsburg, Germany
Background:
Volkswagen's Autostadt—an automotive-themed amusement park—includes a car museum, driving courses, car-factory tours and these 20-story car silos.

Why It's Unique:
European VW buyers can opt to pick up their cars from the robotic car silo instead of the dealership—the automation ensures they will receive a car with an odometer that reads zero. After spending a day enjoying the park, customers watch the central robotic arm travel up the tower and choose their vehicle from the beehive of cars.

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Reinventing the Parking Garage

Departures.com has an interesting article on a Miami parking garage that has been reinvented and given a brand new look. You can read the entire article here.

Reinventing the Parking Garage

By: Departures.com

Zaha Hadid is the latest in a series of starchitects to design a garage in Miami Beach.

When a delegation from Miami Beach flew to Art Basel in Switzerland last June looking for architectural inspiration for new city projects, they ended up with a plan for a parking garage. But not just any garage: a floating figure eight designed by world-renowned starchitect Zaha Hadid. At the Art Basel design fair, Miami Beach mayor Matti Bower and city manager Jorge Gonzalez got a close look at some of Hadid’s recent work and were especially drawn to the public green spaces in her plans for Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park. So when the commission for a $13 million garage at Miami Beach’s Collins Park came up soon after, they asked Hadid to enter the competition. It was no surprise that she won—her stunning form-based plan and presentation is legendary—but what was shocking was that she and a roster of world-renowned international architects, from Daniel Libeskind to Robert A.M. Stern, would compete head to head to build something as quotidian as a parking structure.

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How to Make a Parking Garage Energy Efficient

RenewableEnergyWorld.com has an article about the how to make a parking garage energy efficient. You can read the entire article here.

How to Make a Parking Garage Energy Efficient
By Heather Lammers, NREL





WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It's no secret that researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) do cool things — including finding new ways to capture energy from the sun and wind. But there's nothing cooler than working on a parking garage, right?

"It doesn't sound glamorous, but it is a place for building energy savings," NREL Energy Efficiency Research Engineer Jennifer Scheib said. "A garage typically uses 15% of the energy that the building that it is designed to support uses. Many would say it's only 15% of the energy, but we'd say it's still 15% that can be improved on. For every watt you save in the building, that's $33 worth of photovoltaics you don't have to buy when you are targeting net-zero energy." A net-zero energy building produces as much energy as it uses over the course of a year.

NREL bid the parking garage and accompanying site entrance building for the lab's expanded campus using the same streamlined design-build process that was leveraged in the construction of the Research Support Facility (RSF). The team of RNL and Haselden Construction partnered with NREL to build these new energy-efficient facilities.

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