Pretty Parking

Downtown Boulder is host to quite a few large parking garages and I am happy to report to you that most of them blend fairly well into their surroundings and seem not to be overly disruptive. Driving in these spaces, like all parking garages through which I have driven, takes a certain measure of patience and control over your tendency for vertigo, but they serve a purpose for which their form is designed. Some ramps take you up while others take you down and while this might not be confusing in theory, understanding the design of this system in practice can be slightly more confusing (if not dizzying). There is a particular twisty turny round and round we go garage in Denver which I will no longer enter, but so be it.

That no one wants to hold their wedding, formal meal, fashion show or yoga class where I park my car in the winter was not disappointing to me until I read an article in the New York Times this past weekend about a structure in the middle of Miami Beach that has begun to double as the most fashionable place to live, work and... park. The $65 million 1111 Lincoln Road building encompasses retail, residential and office space to go along with some of the prettiest parking in the world. The seventh floor's 25,000 sq ft of space (complete with full catering facility and audio/ visual capabilities) can be reserved for anything Robert Wennett could possibly dream of. Wennett, who has worked in cities all over the US making promising pockets of lots into windfalls for his clients, conjured this wonder structure to make all the experiences it represents better- indoor, outdoor and yes, even the parking.

What I like best about this story is not the industrial and fashionably gritty idea of a very windy event for 500 of your closest friends in black tie on the seventh floor of a parking garage (but I do like that a lot). I love that parking garages represent dingy, cold, nausea-inducing spaces for me but for Wennett they are potential multi-use art-plexes of endless integrated opportunity. Wennett envisioned design as being able to lift a concept with which we are all familiar out of the ordinary and into something no one had ever seen before. He took a mundane part the morning commute and transformed it into a spectacularly beautiful, vibrant, and intricate space.