Reimagining the Parking Garage

LeBlanc: “The way to look at it is multi-use programming for the short term and future-use or next-use programming for the long term—today it’s a parking garage, but in 25 years it could be a beautiful office building.”

LOS ANGELES—Architects and designers are now looking at creating more flexible and sustainably built structures that lend themselves to alternative uses and have an eye toward smarter future redevelopment, Boston-based Utile Inc. principal Michael LeBlanc tells GlobeSt.com. LeBlanc will be speaking at NAIOP’s upcoming office conference here, O.CON, on the “Parking Garage of the Future.” We spoke with him exclusively about how parking garages are changing to accommodate shifting needs in the short and long term.

GlobeSt.com: Why do you believe parking structures need to evolve?

LeBlanc: The idea was a little derivative of a studio that I was teaching at Northeastern on next-use buildings. We were taking a look at buildings with nine lives, so to speak—buildings that don’t want to die, but instead last many hundreds of years and accommodate many different types of programs. These are exemplary types of buildings in terms of resiliency and durability through different types of weather and other elements. What started off as textile mills, sugar plants and other uses are now law offices, architecture firms, etc. The most sustainable buildings were those that needed to be rebuilt the fewest times, since there’s an enormous amount of energy that goes into tearing down and rebuilding.

We started to apply this to different types of programs. My partner here at Utile, Tim Love, found the perfect opportunity while working with Howard Davis at the Boston Convention Center. They have a whole area where they’re helping to push development of a certain type. With potential public transportation upgrades, the thought was that some public parking garages might render themselves obsolete at some point in the future, while others are only useful at certain times of the day or week. At one point, a study revealed that there were eight million parking spaces in Phoenix for approximately 1.2 million cars. Think about the real estate investment there—where every car gets eight spaces. Now imagine overlaying that in Manhattan or Downtown Boston and think about what that does to the very fabric of a city. That is the fundamental basis of this thinking.

GlobeSt.com: How do you see the parking garage of the future changing from what it is today?

LeBlanc: There’s both a short-term and a long-term concept. In the short term, there’s an enormous number of parking structures built for people who park Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and in the evenings and on weekends they’re empty. Often you have a parking structure right next to a suburban train station to serve people commuting into the city. Here in Boston, for example, we have a commuter rail serving hundreds of thousands of commuters a day, and most of the parking structures and train stations are located next to a Downtown center. For that situation, you could have a first floor with an 18-foot-high ceiling and elegant columning so doesn’t feel like a parking garage, and on the weekend it could be a flea market or a farmer’s market. There could be less-static uses where it’s not just about parking, which represents 30% of the hours in a week. The ground floor of a parking garage is most ripe for opportunity, but the top floor of the parking deck could also be extremely flexible and useful for rollerblading, basketball, etc. So you’d have the ground floor plus an open deck on top that could allow for more uses.

The long-term version is you build a parking garage today and 15 years from now it’s only being used at 20% capacity. Perhaps there were regional transformations and the buildings could have a higher and better use than parking, whether it’s office, residential, university or school use. In those cases, the idea is to the use parking garage today as a great catalyzer for economic development, but build it so that eventually the floor loading could handle office loading. It may seem that floor-loading capacity for parking garages would already be able to accommodate office loading, since cars are heavy, but if you do the math, cars are not as heavy as the combination of office furniture, equipment, files, people, etc. So, you’re building a superstructure for a different use down the road. You’re looking at basic design criteria for multiple possible options in the future, such as adding another rebar in the slab in the future, so that the costs upfront are embedded and minimal.

GlobeSt.com: What should parking garage developers keep in mind when approaching the structures in this manner?

LeBlanc: First and foremost, you need flexibility and resiliency. You’ll be calibrating ceiling heights and creating floor-loading capacity and column spacings that work not just for vehicles, but also for future uses. Most parking garages have very short floor-to-floor heights because cars are short, but a seven-foot ceiling height doesn’t work if you have to put in ductwork and other infrastructure for any future use. Also, most office and residential buildings have a tremendous amount of vertical systems that run through them: air recirculation, trash chutes, ventilation, etc. You need to make sure you have knockout panels that could be easily removed without disrupting the entire structure.

The way to look at it is multi-use programming for the short term and future-use or next-use programming for the long term—today, it’s a parking garage but in 25 years it could be a beautiful office building. Also, if you think about all these parking garages, they all have pitched floors for rain runoff. You need a strategy for leveling off those floors. Think about having a ramp system that is almost like a saddlebag attached to side of garage, that could be pulled apart and recycled and reused at a different location. The continuous-ramp structure of many of today’s parking garages is efficient for current use, but it would be a terrible future-use parking structure.

GlobeSt.com: What other factors come into play in parking garage design?

LeBlanc: We’re not parking experts—we’ve designed a couple, but there are parking engineering firms that know how to do this back-and-forth. We’re approaching this more from a long term urban design standpoint. If your parking garage has no flexibility or becomes obsolete, you will need to either tear it down or it becomes place you don’t want to walk past.

The factors we look at are a little bit external to the parking structure: What is the economic health of the area? What kind of transformations in density or public transportation are taking place in the area? What is the proximity to other destination areas nearby? Also, regionally: What is the transportation policy in the certain area? Are there ways to transform the first floor into retail and the upper floors into parking? What about partial versus complete transformation, if less parking is needed in the area in the future?

The more parking structures are rewarding renewable energy, the better they will be able to serve. Imagine all first-floor parking reserved for electric car parking—these would be privileged positions—and other infrastructural ideas like a top level built of steel to accommodate solar panels to charge the cars in the structure. It could be designed as part of the future-use strategy: there’s already a highly flexible steel structure up above with much fewer limitations on column spacing than the concrete down below.

GlobeSt.com: What else should our readers know about the parking garage of the future?

LeBlanc: It works better in certain regions than others. In Boston, people pay $45 a day to park, so everybody is wrestling for parking spaces, but that isn’t the case everywhere. Parking has huge value, but it’s becoming less so. A lot of parking set up is beginning to become obsolete in certain areas. It’s really impacting perimeter neighborhoods and towns and cities that are super dense.