While Vancouver is busily tearing down parkades (parking structures or garages, as others call them), other cities see them as architectural opportunities. Notably Miami Beach:
After opening the Herzog & De Mueron-designed garage (above) on Lincoln Road, it’s due to cut the ribbon on another by Arquitectonica:
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Atlantic Cities posted 16 examples from around the world, like these from Malmo, Sweden, and Kansas City :
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Fourteen more here.
And in Vancouver, here’s what we do:
This shot of the Thurlow Street parkade was taken in mid-September, and already gone by now.
The above-grade parkade at Symphony Place on Seymour (which provides parking to the Orpheum) has a glass sculpture prettying up the facade…
In Vancouver we generally do not to prettify what would generally be a ground level dead zone as almost all new parking is required to be under the building that needs it. As good example though of an above ground parkade upgrade is the Gastown parkade, which now has commercial and office at the front on Water Street.
You can pretty these things up architecturally but they deaden the street for the most part. Austin is full of relatively nice looking parkades – the area around the state capitol complex runs to blocks of them, and similarly downtown. Even when there are the odd stores at grade, the space feels dead.
The parkade being deconstructed on Alberni Street in Vancouver (pictured above) may be an example of the removal of parking structures from street level and above, but it does not signal the defeat of the car and the triumph of other modes of travel.
It does represent the prorization of the pedestrian realm in Vancouver planning and development approvals, though. Car parking is being forced deeper and deeper underground, at great cost. Recent developments, such as the Jameson, the Hudson, the Shangri-La, the new twisty tower on Georgia, and Telus Garden, are having basement parkades going down 8-10 stories with their underground parking, at great expense, I am sure.
It shows that just because parking is expensive to provide, does not mean that it will not be provided. I do not disagree that paring is usually ugly and deadening, but it is one more reason that new development in Vancouver just becomes ever more costly.