The parking garages of the Miami Design District are genuinely worth the detour

Architecture · Miami

Reading time: 10 min

A parking garage is usually the last building in a district anyone thinks to design. In the Miami Design District, developer Craig Robins commissioned two of them from architects who normally build museums and galleries. The result, led by the Museum Garage’s five-way collaboration between WORKac, J. Mayer H., Nicolas Buffe, Clavel Arquitectos and K/R, is a working argument about what an unglamorous building type can do when nobody treats it as unglamorous.

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Introduction

Drivers circling the Miami Design District for a space rarely expect the building holding their car to be the most argued-over piece of architecture in the neighbourhood. The Museum Garage, on NE 41st Street, is seven storeys of parking wrapped in five entirely different facades, each designed independently by a different architecture or design studio, none of whom saw what the others were doing until the building was finished. A few streets away, the City View Garage wears a folded aluminium screen by IwamotoScott Architecture, a rippling stainless steel skin by Leong Leong, and a public artwork by John Baldessari rendered as a perforated metal panel the size of a building elevation.

Neither structure is a museum, a gallery or a showroom. Both are, in the most literal sense, car parks. That they have become genuine stops on a walk through the district, photographed as often as anything on Design Miami’s exhibition floor, is the point worth examining. It did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because parking needed rebranding. It happened because the district’s developer decided a building type nobody else takes seriously was exactly the one worth taking seriously, and then found architects willing to prove it.

The exquisite corpse experiment

The Museum Garage’s premise borrows directly from a parlour game. Cadavre exquis, exquisite corpse, was a Surrealist technique in which several artists each drew a section of a figure without seeing what the others had drawn, folding the paper to conceal their contribution before passing it on. André Breton and his circle used it to generate images no single imagination would have produced. Terence Riley, the architect and former MoMA and Miami Art Museum curator who organised the Museum Garage, applied the same rule to a building facade. Five architecture and design practices were each given a section of the seven-storey structure and asked to design it without seeing the others’ work.

The five contributions, assembled on the corner of NE 41st Street and NE 1st Avenue, are these. WORKac, the New York studio run by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, designed Ant Farm, a perforated screen running the building’s east and north sides that turns the garage’s four-foot facade depth into a stack of public rooms rather than a flat surface. J. Mayer H., the Berlin studio led by Jürgen Mayer H., produced XOX (Hugs and Kisses), a corner treatment of interlocking volumetric shapes in black, blue and red stripes, borrowing the aerodynamic language of automotive design and returning it to the building that houses the cars. Nicolas Buffe, a Paris-based artist and designer, made Serious Play, a dark, laser-cut and milled panel of manga and anime characters rendered in a Baroque ornamental register, fronted by four caryatid figures roughly seven metres tall. Clavel Arquitectos, the Alicante practice, contributed Urban Jam, several dozen car body shells in metallic gold and silver, arranged as if suspended mid-collision across the wall, cast in fibreglass and mounted with structural attachment systems engineered specifically to carry their irregular loads. And K/R, the New York firm Keenen/Riley, designed Barricades, a facade built from orange-and-white striped aluminium extrusions that quote Miami’s own traffic barriers back at the street, punctuated by fifteen mirror-framed window openings and concrete planters.

The detail that tends to get lost in the retelling is that K/R is Terence Riley’s own firm. The curator who set the rules of the game also played it, designing one of the five sections under the blind-collaboration conditions he had imposed on everyone else. Timothy Haahs and Associates (now trading as THA Consulting), the Pennsylvania-based parking specialist, served as architect and engineer of record throughout, which is the unglamorous but essential role of translating five incompatible creative visions into a building that meets Florida’s structural and fire codes and still functions as an 800-space garage with ground-floor retail. The building opened to the public on 24 April 2018, following a soft opening and architects’ panel discussion at ICA Miami the previous evening.

Five facades, five arguments about what a facade is for

What separates the Museum Garage from a decorated shed is that each of the five contributions is answering a different question about what a facade actually does, not simply what it can be made to look like.

WORKac’s Ant Farm is the most functionally serious of the five. Behind its perforated aluminium screen, painted white outside and a vivid pink within, the practice inserted a four-foot-deep sequence of genuine public amenities: a graffiti gallery, a children’s play area with a slide and climbing wall, a garden with a palm tree irrigated by roof runoff, a DJ platform, a lending library, a listening lounge, a fountain, a bar, and a car wash and charging bay, with a small rooftop auditorium and beach area created by removing a run of parking spaces. The screen’s job is not decorative. It conceals and reveals these insertions as pedestrians move past, so the facade reads differently depending on where you are standing and what time of day it is. The project has since collected an AIA Miami Design Award and an International Architecture Award for parking and transportation buildings, recognition that sits oddly with a structure whose main job is still storing cars, and that is exactly the point WORKac is making: the storage and the public realm do not have to be separate problems.

J. Mayer H.’s corner treatment works the opposite way, through pure surface language. The interlocking XOX forms borrow directly from car design, the kind of faceted, tension-loaded surfacing found on a bonnet or a bumper, and apply it at architectural scale with embedded lighting that activates the corner after dark. It is the facade doing what automotive styling does to a body panel, scaled up until the building itself reads as a piece of industrial design rather than a piece of architecture.

Buffe’s Serious Play is the most maximalist of the five, mixing eighteenth-century Baroque ornament with the visual grammar of Japanese anime and video games, milled in black and white HDPE with varying standoff depths that create genuine relief rather than printed pattern. The caryatids framing the pedestrian entrance are a direct, slightly mischievous quotation of classical architecture’s load-bearing figures, except here they are holding up a facade of cartoon characters rather than a Greek temple’s entablature. Clavel Arquitectos take the same idea of the car as an object worth honouring and go the other way, casting dozens of car shells in gold and silver and mounting them as if frozen mid-collision, a wall of vehicles crashing into the building that exists to store vehicles. K/R’s barricade facade is the most municipal in tone, translating the orange-and-white striping of Miami’s own traffic infrastructure into an architectural surface, a facade that quotes the street furniture surrounding it rather than importing an outside reference.

None of this would have been buildable without A. Zahner Company, the Kansas City metal fabricator that engineered and manufactured all five facades from a single set of design-assist workshops with each practice, working through geometry, anchorage, paint specification and constructability before a single panel was cut. Zahner’s Drop & Lock panel system and ZEPPS engineering process are what allowed five formally unrelated designs, ranging from milled HDPE to painted aluminium extrusions to cast fibreglass car bodies, to be hung on the same structural frame and meet the same waterproofing and wind-load standards. The Museum Garage’s real engineering achievement is not any single facade. It is that a Baroque manga relief, a set of flying car bodies and a striped traffic barrier can share a building envelope without one system compromising another.

City View Garage: the building that came first

Three years before the Museum Garage opened, a smaller, quieter experiment in the same neighbourhood set the precedent. The City View Garage, completed in 2015 two blocks from the Museum Garage, wraps a seven-storey, 599-space structure of roughly 283,000 square feet in three separate facade treatments, again with TimHaahs as architect, engineer and parking consultant of record.

IwamotoScott Architecture, the San Francisco practice run by Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott, designed the building’s southeast corner, wrapping the elevator lobby, an exterior stair and an office block in a screen of mechanically folded, digitally fabricated aluminium panels across five repeating modules and forty distinct panel types. The apertures vary in size across the surface, controlling ventilation without mechanical plant while a custom gradient paint job shifts the wall from deep to pale blue as it wraps the corner. Iwamoto has described the brief in practical terms: the cars sit hard against the building edge, so screening had to happen at the skin rather than through setback, and the studio wanted the result to read more like fabric draped over the structure than a set of flat panels.

Leong Leong, the New York and Los Angeles practice founded by brothers Christopher and Dominic Leong, took the western elevation, in titanium-coated stainless steel folded and cut into thousands of individual sections. From the adjacent highway, the wall reads as a shimmering, water-like surface; from street level, its folded fins echo the fronds of the palms planted around the building. Christopher Leong has described the effect as a facade that simultaneously radiates and dissolves, a wall that behaves differently depending on the speed and distance from which it is seen, a driver on the expressway and a pedestrian on the pavement effectively looking at two different buildings.

The third contributor was not an architect at all. John Baldessari, the conceptual artist whose Post-Studio practice has spent five decades interrogating photography and found imagery, was commissioned by Craig Robins to translate two of his photographic works, titled Fun One and Fun Two, into a perforated stainless steel screen using Zahner’s Angel Hair and ImageWall processes, which convert a photographic image into a field of variously sized cut apertures that resolve into a picture at a distance. The image, three figures at a swimming pool, sits on part of the garage’s south-facing wall, making Baldessari’s work a genuine piece of public art rather than an applied mural, since the perforations that form the image also do the structural job of screening the parking floors behind them. The building went on to win the Award for Architectural Achievement at the International Parking Institute’s 2016 Awards of Excellence, now run under the renamed International Parking & Mobility Institute, one of relatively few parking structures anywhere to be recognised primarily for its architecture rather than its operational efficiency.

Why a developer commissions this instead of a standard deck

Parking structures are, by most measures, the least design-conscious building type any city produces. They are built to a cost per space, engineered for turning radius and structural spans rather than elevation, and are usually the first thing value-engineered on a development budget. What makes the Design District’s two garages an anomaly is not that they look different. It is that Craig Robins, the developer who has spent more than two decades assembling the district for Dacra in partnership with LVMH‘s real estate arm, treated parking infrastructure as part of the same cultural programme as the galleries, showrooms and public art he was simultaneously commissioning throughout the neighbourhood. The same pattern shows up elsewhere in his portfolio, from a Richard Tuttle installation at a residential tower to a Gabriel Orozco mural inside Dacra’s own offices. A parking garage, in this reading, is simply another building surface that a district built on design credibility cannot afford to leave undesigned.

That calculation has a practical dimension too. Both garages carry heavy volumes of ground-floor retail and office space beneath their upper decks, so the buildings needed street-level presence regardless of what happened above. But the decision to commission five separate architecture practices for one facade, rather than a single firm working across the whole envelope, was not a retail necessity. It was a curatorial one, and it is the reason the Museum Garage in particular reads less like a building with a nice facade and more like five buildings occupying the same footprint, each arguing for a different idea of what decoration, structure and civic generosity can mean on a car park.

Whether a parking garage deserves this much architectural attention is, inevitably, the question visitors ask first. The buildings themselves answer it by function rather than argument. WORKac’s public rooms are used, not merely photographed; Baldessari’s screen does structural screening work that a blank wall would otherwise have needed; Zahner’s fabrication systems solve a genuine constructability problem rather than a purely aesthetic one. The spectacle is real, and so is the substance underneath it, which is the harder trick to pull off in a building type this ordinary.

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Frequently asked questions

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Final thoughts

The Design District’s two garages succeed for a reason that has little to do with novelty. A parking structure is one of the few building types where a facade genuinely has almost nothing to do beyond keeping weather and sightlines under control, which makes it an unusually free canvas and an unusually easy place to fail with empty spectacle. What the Museum Garage and City View Garage share is that their most striking surfaces are also doing structural, ventilating or programmatic work: WORKac’s screen houses a garden and a library, Baldessari’s perforations screen a parking floor, Zahner’s engineering holds together five formally unrelated systems on one frame. Parkitecture, as a term, risks sounding like a punchline. These two buildings are the argument for taking it seriously.