Parking Garages like this are eyesores and do nothing to contribute to the streetscape - Would it have been so tough to place retail shops on the street level?

so UCSD has some interesting parking structures, the only problem is they are raising tuition fees for students and building 100 million dollar parking structures that are "artistic"- which seems a bit absurd, but hey gives the campus some flare right?

I have to give a shout-out to this parking garage in downtown Cincinnati, which was surfaced last summer with a block-long Op Art installation by artist Julian Stanczak:

http://visualingual.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/julian-stanczak-installation-downtown/

Yes, almost all parking garages are eyesores, but there are some inspiring examples of ground-level retail, interesting surface treatment or, in this case, a large public art project.

This is a classic parking garage in Stockholm, Sweden:

http://www.parkaden.se/

Click "Fotogalleri" for photo gallery. Note how they've incorporated the floor number in the design!

I was actually just visiting a parking garage so beautiful, I hung out there for an hour (no, I didn't inhale too many exhaust fumes).

The new 5th Avenue North Parking Garage just opened at the Seattle Center, and it's gorgeous. There's a coffee shop that opens to the indoor lot, public art and a plaza right off the main entrance, and capivating building architecture that includes a large green roof. Both sustainable and aesthetically pleasing.

I (amazingly) couldn't find any pics online (it just opened). But here's a link to the rendering:
www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/QuickFacts/500FifthNorth/Newsletters/2006Summer.htm

Ack! I can't link anything for some reason. Ah well. Just Google Image:

Seattle Center Fifth Avenue North Parking Garage

...if curious :)

Parking garages don't have to be ugly http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n6/NathnWlkr/StautonGarage1.jpg Thanks Mayor Riley.

However, the parking issue is bigger than just building prettier garages... http://www.epa.gov/dced/parking.htm

oops... http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n6/NathnWlkr/StauntonGarage1.jpg

I love when cities spend the extra money and stick the parking underground. Barcelona has some great public plazas with parking garages buried below.

i'm an urban designer and sadly i spend a lot of time addressing parking decks. you can definitely build a good deck- the best ones are wrapped with active uses or at least have ground floor activity, but when you get down to it they are a big dead space in the vibrancy of a city- necessary (at least in many places) yes, but instead of being full of activity they are basically a storage shed. did you know that in many office buildings the space devoted to your car is actually larger than the space devoted to the employee?
clearly cars have a negative impact on cities beyond the aesthetics of the decks we use to warehouse them.

In Toronto any new development downtown has an obligation to meet the parking needs of the people coming in to use the developed space. It's then up to the City Planner (and usually area businesses/ residents via the Committee of Adjustments) to ensure that it does not detract from the streetscape. I agree that the City should try to avoid eyesores, but this is not paid for by the City, it's a cost imposed by the City on the developer (and rightly so).

the Government Center parking garage in Boston makes my top 10 list of worst buildings, anywhere. it's a brutalist, 6 story concrete monolith that stretches over Congress St. and completely cuts off the West End from the activity around Haymarket and the North End. if I can find a photo of this monstrosity, I'll post it.

The Julian Stanczak is fabulous! The rest look like all the parking garages in my city - concrete jails for cars. And the stairwells smell like urine which, I guess, is a separate issue.

The parking structure on the backside of city hall in Santa Monica is pretty groovy looking and it is either LEED approved or uses primarily solar power ( I can't recall the exact detail).

There are some great parking garages in Rotterdam, and I like how they place dry cleaners and other relevant stores at the base level: these are convenient, and the increased traffic and people-presence makes these garages feel safer and less desolate.

Having experience working for a firm designing condos under construction in Austin at the moment let me just put in my comments... the architects come up with great solutions at masking the parking garage and come up with several ideas at incorporating them into the facade and blend in so that they "disappear" but when the reality of construction costs come in all of that time and effort in these great ideas get thrown away due to value engineering. Developers/clients can't justify the cost of a parking structure that they will get minimum return on.

Sometimes Austin's parking garages make me sad, but I just assume they are a necessary evil.

can't they mask those condos downtown so that they disappear as well. thus far, i don't find any of those new ones beautiful or even entertaining...and i am all for building up rather than out. how about some sort of plasma screen so we can slap an image of town lake on there? or just blue sky where, well, sky used to be?

Manueln has it. As an architect, I know very well that the good intentions in plans rarely see the daylight, when costs are the king of everything. However, it is possible to make garages less ugly even with less money, it just takes more effort. But the cheapest option is that plain concrete version, and that´s why most of garages look the way they do.
Townplanning is crucial too, as it dictates whether you can put any shops etc on the ground level.

Someone allready pointed this out, the space reserved per car in parking garage is approx 25-30 square meters, in office building every user gets approx. 16-22 sq m. Including corridors and common space.

aiko-

We parked in that Stockholm garage only last week! Cool!

I was going to post that, for the most part (cool NK parkade excepted), in Europe parking garages tend to be underground.

The floors of these underground lots, both private and municipal, tend to be stunningly clean and new -- nicer than the stuff in many living rooms. In Switzerland, you will find municipal underground parking lots in even relatively small towns, probably due to the scarcity of land in downtown areas. And for the most part, these parking lots are much, much cheaper than parking lots in North America.

Paul Rudolph's garage in New Haven is one of the most interesting structures around.

How about a little urban planning so we use our cars less? We'll probably always need the darn things, but we could build them fewer and smaller. I used to actually walk places in Austin. West Campus to Zilker Park was my longest trek, because I got sick of waiting for the stinkin' Cap Metro. (And ah, the Town Lake condo debate. I haven't been back to see them... maybe I shouldn't anyway...)

There is a garage in Houston with planters along all the sides. I think there are bouganvillas in them. It's quite cool. Building them too far underground is really not an option at sea level.

"Building them too far underground is really not an option at sea level."

Wrong.

We do it in San Francisco all the time - Union Square has a huge 5-6 level parking garage underneath, Embarcadero Center has 4-5 levels of garages below them (on reclaimed land, no less - 150 years ago, it was San Francisco Bay) and we have a new underground parking garage in Golden Gate Park.

World Trade Center in NYC had several parking levels beneath the towers - all below the level of the Hudson River.

Almost all of the Netherlands is below sea level - and they have underground parking garages.

we're not going to recognize our own skyline soon...or maybe we will, but those images will replace town lake and some of the hills and greenery...and the frost bank tower (HA!)

FYI, the National Building Museum in DC is organizing an exhibit about parking garages that opens in October:

http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/house-of-cars.html

The random thing is that they're reproducing my photo of the Julian Stanczak one in Cincinnati. When I got a query about rights from a curator there, I thought it was a joke! Anyway, I'm sure it will be an interesting exhibit, certainly without precedent.