Innovative Garage Doubles as Urban Art
Alan Hess, San Jose Mercury News
Sunday, December 15, 2002
The average city will devote talent and money to decent architecture for monuments such as city halls and museums that most people use only occasionally. What's surprising is how much ordinary architecture that we use daily is allowed to be designed as an afterthought-or not designed at all.
Take parking structures. They are treated by architects and the public as necessary evils in exchange for the joys of mobility, an afterthought to be escaped as quickly as possible.
It doesn't matter how welcoming Richard Meier's new San Jose City Hall will be; if visitors have to slog through a dank, confusing concrete cavern filled with noxious fumes and frightening screeches to get there from their car, the bloom is already off the experience.
Bad parking structures are, alas, still the norm. The new ones at Westfield Shoppingtown Valley Fair are as depraved and monstrous as any we have seen.
So San Jose shows a rare willingness to pay attention to the minor monuments of daily life in the new seven-level, 750-space parking structure next to the new City Hall at Fourth and San Fernando streets. Designed by Ellerbe Becket Architects and Engineers and opening this week, it makes a moment of light and order out of the mundane activity of stowing your car.
The attention that the Redevelopment Agency has turned on the new parking structure shows a true consideration for urban life.
The new garage is no garden spot but it raises the level of public amenities. It is still concrete, but the stairs and elevators, the entries and walkways we traverse are designed as real spaces instead of as stark, claustrophobic fire escapes.
As seen by pedestrians and motorists from the street, it is a handsomely composed, crisply detailed block that will blend well with the new City Hall-and actually surpasses the new San Jose State University library to the south as architectural sculpture.
More than monoliths
Of course San Jose, a car city par excellence, has a history of innovative garages. San Jose State's garage at Ninth and San Fernando streets was designed in 1970 by the highly respected design firm Callister and Payne, who turned the utilitarian railings into lively sculpture. The Steinberg Group designed the garage at St. John and Market streets with a well-composed tile facade to fit into its site, a major gateway to downtown. And the ill-fated Building Seven at Santana Row took another inventive leap, wrapping a shell of housing and shops around a core garage, with a townhome community with lawns and streets on its roof.
Helping-and complicating-the new city building are its multiple uses. A ground floor with 19,000 square feet of retail space will enliven the sidewalk when it is rented. It's an improvement on the average garage, which offers to the street only a blank wall or a dull view of a sea of cars.
But even more innovative is the addition of a top floor banquet hall, operated by the city and leased to a concessionaire. The roof of a parking structure is often the best place to view a city, and this one will offer spectacular views of San Jose in a handsome setting when it opens in a few months. Its design equals any hotel ballroom in town-a positive contribution to the emerging civic center.
Mixing retail, food service and parking complicated the design. The banquet hall had to be insulated from the rumbles and honking horns of the garage. But Ellerbe Becket uses these additions imaginatively to create a distinctive building. The banquet hall provides the opportunity for a trellised outdoor terrace; a bank of elevators on Fourth Street brings the building alive. This building clearly looks like something more than a warehouse for resting automobiles.
Though the parking spaces and ramps are conventional, the designers have taken advantage of the pathways from car to street level to upgrade the parking experience. At each floor's elevator and stair lobby, the concrete becomes finished, the walls are paneled in silver metal, and the design becomes more articulated, as we would expect in the lobby of a high-rise office building.
The garage is also a polished example of urban design-the way it is seen and experienced from the city's point of view.
Like Meier's design for City Hall, this is a graceful modern composition of parallel and perpendicular planes. While picking up on Meier's themes, it remains, properly, a supporting building. The planes are metal or concrete, solid or perforated, textured or cut open to create a sculpture of contrasting solids and voids, controlling light and obscuring the cars from the street. The planes slip past each other, reveal each other and create an abstract design.
Interesting lines
The first floor's horizontal slab juts out over the sidewalk, creating a strong shadow line; it also doubles as a pathway for disabled people to the elevators.
Along Fourth Street, a plane of louvers is hung from a frame of concrete structural columns. A few feet behind it, another structural wall slices through the building.
Glass railings-an example of the minimalist aesthetic of the design-allow the strong formal qualities of the solid stairs to be displayed.
The elevator banks add a very different kind of sculptural element to the Fourth Street facade-one that is kinetic, glassy and changeable. The greenish glass provides another transparent layer over the louvered wall, bringing the design alive. A changing neon display in the elevator wells-part of the public art program-adds another dimension at night.
This was the last Redevelopment Agency project to be reviewed and improved by the defunct Urban Design Review Board. It shows the polish that the board brought as it tweaked designs and cajoled developers to improve their buildings. Whether future buildings will show the same quality is something to watch closely.
This design shows a respect for the details of daily life that is truly urbane. This is no afterthought, no utilitarian structure to be ignored. The realization that a parking garage has the potential to be a piece of urban sculpture is a great idea.
