MIAMI BEACH GARAGES
Miami Beach is a pretty good little city: dense and walkable with continuous street walls.
Pretty much nobody uses public transportation, yet there are almost no parking lots. This is because in Miami Beach they really know how to do garages:
Sometimes they make them look like other buildings in the area that are not garages, and sometimes they adopt different strategies, but always they have the sense to continue the eye-level streetscape with retail. Can you spot the garage?:
Oh, there it is:
Sometimes a different strategy comes into play. Here’s a row of shops at the base of a verdant mountainside:
Wait a minute! There aren’t any mountains in Florida! What the…?!
Well, I’ll be…! It’s a parking deck disguised as a mountain!
Here’s how it looks at street level:
Around the corner, where the entrance lurks:
The view from inside the garage:
By code, garages must have perimeters that are 50% open to avoid expensive mechanical ventilation. Fortunately, the code official does not regard greenery as an obstruction. Plants in Florida do not lose their leaves; this solution would not work in most U.S. climates.
Here’s a newer garage with the plants just getting started. You can imagine how this will look in a year or two:
Parking in Miami Beach is a municipal utility; the city charges the same in these garages as at the ubiquitous curbside parking meters (25 cents for 15 minutes). You use one of the garages if you can’t find a space on the street or if you want to park for more than the curbside limit of two hours. Only three parking lots survive, charging a higher and uncompetitive rate (subject to negotiation) for the convenience of not having to drive inside a gloomy garage. These will soon disappear; and when they are redeveloped, the city will again be complete and restored. Until that happy moment, they provide the same wretched dosage of urban blight that is yielded by all parking lots:
Even in Miami Beach it took a while to catch on to how to do a proper garage. Here is an older example that tries valiantly with its architecture while failing urbanistically. This example is hamstrung by its suburban ideology: note the preposterous little front lawn and of course the single-use zoning. No ground floor shops here:
Even further back, they were naïve enough to think you can screen a garage with trees. Touching optimism:
And the final aberration of old-timey modernism—parking garage as sculptural form:
Miami Beach is a pretty good little city: dense and walkable with continuous street walls.
Pretty much nobody uses public transportation, yet there are almost no parking lots. This is because in Miami Beach they really know how to do garages:
Sometimes they make them look like other buildings in the area that are not garages, and sometimes they adopt different strategies, but always they have the sense to continue the eye-level streetscape with retail. Can you spot the garage?:
Oh, there it is:
Sometimes a different strategy comes into play. Here’s a row of shops at the base of a verdant mountainside:
Wait a minute! There aren’t any mountains in Florida! What the…?!
Well, I’ll be…! It’s a parking deck disguised as a mountain!
Here’s how it looks at street level:
Around the corner, where the entrance lurks:
The view from inside the garage:
By code, garages must have perimeters that are 50% open to avoid expensive mechanical ventilation. Fortunately, the code official does not regard greenery as an obstruction. Plants in Florida do not lose their leaves; this solution would not work in most U.S. climates.
Here’s a newer garage with the plants just getting started. You can imagine how this will look in a year or two:
Parking in Miami Beach is a municipal utility; the city charges the same in these garages as at the ubiquitous curbside parking meters (25 cents for 15 minutes). You use one of the garages if you can’t find a space on the street or if you want to park for more than the curbside limit of two hours. Only three parking lots survive, charging a higher and uncompetitive rate (subject to negotiation) for the convenience of not having to drive inside a gloomy garage. These will soon disappear; and when they are redeveloped, the city will again be complete and restored. Until that happy moment, they provide the same wretched dosage of urban blight that is yielded by all parking lots:
Even in Miami Beach it took a while to catch on to how to do a proper garage. Here is an older example that tries valiantly with its architecture while failing urbanistically. This example is hamstrung by its suburban ideology: note the preposterous little front lawn and of course the single-use zoning. No ground floor shops here:
Even further back, they were naïve enough to think you can screen a garage with trees. Touching optimism:
And the final aberration of old-timey modernism—parking garage as sculptural form:
. But you're right, the parking decks almost seamlessly merge with the block. And I too had to take several double takes to realize that there isn't a mountain in Miami Beach.
