OVERVIEW
The 20th century saw a new type of building burst onto the urban landscape: the parking garage, which accompanied the rise of the private vehicle as a driving force of progress and modernist planning. As networks of highways were overlaid on cities and landscapes, sometimes with great violence to the existing physical and social fabric, the parking garage was inserted as transfer nodes between cars and pedestrians. In cities they also served as tethers to populations increasingly dispersed into suburban sprawl. An exemplar of this ruthless advance can be seen in the conversion of a previous generation’s cultural landmark, the Michigan Theater in Detroit, into a parking garage in the mid-1970s.
At this time, parking garages stand as symbols of car dependence and the unsustainability of carbon-based energy dependence. As spaces, they have long gripped the collective imagination, with portrayals – especially in movies – as places of looming threat or where illicit exchanges and violence dwell.
And yet, the tide is turning. The decarbonization of urban transportation has already begun in Europe: the number of vehicles in Paris is decreasing by 18,000 per year, where two-thirds of residents do not own—or have stopped owning—a private vehicle. Car-sharing systems have led to the underutilization and point towards the eventual obsolescence of parking garages. The initial response has been to demolish them to make way for other urban development projects.
However, the architecture of parking garages—with their architectural and urban structures rationalized to the extreme and their elemental forms optimized both technically and economically—holds great potential, allowing us to consider the next step: the transformation of parking garages into spaces that can repair cities.
New Haven was a model city for modernist planning, setting in motion patterns experienced by many other American cities. Its uniqueness also lies in the architectural quality of its parking garages—with notable examples by Paul Rudolph, Kevin Roche, Granbery, Cash & Associates, and others—which makes New Haven a laboratory for envisioning the future, facilitating the not-too-distant shift toward self-driving and shared-transportation cities.
The New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum by Roche Dinkeloo, a sublime arena crowned with a parking structure, was demolished in 2005, resulting in a significant loss of modern and brutalist heritage architecture. Our studio proposes circumventing this trend by repurposing these remarkable structures to introduce programs that revitalize and enhance urban life.
THE STUDIO
Building on previous semesters, the studio will be design-focused and will continue to explore how architectural heritage can be leveraged to address the contemporary challenges facing our society.
We will examine New Haven’s parking infrastructure as architectural heritage that must not be lost but also needs to be renovated and repurposed to meet the city’s new needs, making it more inclusive, democratic, and welcoming. We will conduct a survey of parking facilities in New Haven, focusing on five emblematic examples, which will be studied in depth. At the same time, we will conduct a dual investigation into the potential needs of the areas where these facilities are located and into precedents for repurposed buildings, which will provide us with the keys to their transformation.
Early in the semester, talks by experts will help us to understand the challenges and potential of parking infrastructure, as well as the possibilities for transformation through structural analysis, repurposing, and site revitalization. The studio will not only focus on building interventions, but will expand its scope to include the urban landscape and the incorporation of innovative programs with great transformative potential.
The studio trip will be a classic American road trip, taking us to Columbus (Indiana), Chicago, and Detroit. This will allow us to see significant patterns firsthand: we will visit mixed-use buildings with iconic parking structures; observe how quality architecture can transform a city; examine how the age of the automobile is intertwined with urban decline; and explore current efforts to revitalize these places.