Hide the Ugly Side of Garages

Ask Southern Californians about parking structures and the words “award-winning” are not the ones that usually come to mind. More likely are: ugly, confusing, scary or obnoxious.

But three years after the collapses of parking structures during the Northridge earthquake, plans and reputations are improving for multilevel garages.

The changes go well beyond the seismic retrofits and new, tougher building codes for earthquake durability.

Aesthetics, comfort and crime-busting are now watchwords in the design of new parking garages. Moreover, there are more efforts to make it easier for lost souls to find their cars after a movie or shopping spree.

The trend is national but is particularly important in Southern California, according to Michael Hricak, past president of the American Institute of Architects’ Los Angeles chapter. “I think there has been a reaction to the ugliness of what came before. So just the utilitarian, warehouse-type building with cars stacked inside is no longer acceptable,” he said.

A recent design prize from the AIA’s California Council to a new 1,370-spot garage at the Fox Studios in Century City is evidence, experts say, that a new generation of parking structures is more considerate of both parkers and neighbors. Developers and cities are willing to spend more garage money to attract customers or spur related investment. Plus, neighborhood associations and city agencies are more picky these days and want to minimize “garageness” as much as possible.

The original Fox plan was scaled down in height after owners of an adjacent hotel expressed fears that views from its swimming pool deck would be blocked. The resulting garage--designed by HLW International and Wayne Banks & Associates--looks like a peach-colored movie theater at its upper entrance on a public street near Avenue of the Stars. From the lower entrance inside the studio lot, it resembles a contemporary Tinkertoy tucked into a hillside. An auto-free walkway lines its westward side. And on the south frontage is a giant mural of Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music.”

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In the past, too many garages in Southern California have turned out to be “pretty devastating,” said Los Angeles architect William Fain. “We spend half our life in a car, and the first point of entry to a lot of places is a parking structure. So the dilemma is how do you make parking structures better?”

His firm, Johnson Fain Partners, and the Sherman Oaks office of International Parking Design are attempting something better with a 1,471-space, $10-million garage that just began construction at Long Beach’s shoreline Queensway Bay redevelopment project. Picking up the maritime theme from a planned aquarium there, the parking structure’s zinc exterior will bear giant cutouts in the shape of fish and other sea creatures. The elevator tower is to look something like a sailing ship.

Around the country, new garages resemble turn-of-the-century townhouses, immense sculptures and hanging gardens--any-thing but detested concrete slabs. Laguna Beach architect L. Paul Zajfen won another rare state AIA prize for a garage five years ago for a pink sandstone-clad structure at Santa Ana’s Civic Center that resembles a contemporary office building. Zajfen said he was not trying to disguise it but was “sensitive to what the obnoxious features of a garage can be.”

Beverly Hills’ latest structure, four levels above and three levels below ground on North Beverly Drive, features a green-and-white clock tower and a Williams-Sonoma store at street level. The success of the Beverly Hills shopping district and the revitalizations of Old Town in Pasadena and the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica have depended in part on ample and relatively inexpensive parking in high-rise garages.

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Drivers may complain about steep ramps and confused layouts, but the economic impact has been incontestable. So other tax-hungry cities are planning parking structures that, ironically, are supposed to encourage walking and often have retail or restaurant space on the ground level.

The city of Los Angeles is building a $9-million, 380-stall structure on Broxton Avenue in Westwood Village that echoes the area’s Mediterranean-style architecture. Culver City and Hermosa Beach are among the communities now engaged in the same kind of design debates that business owners and residents in Westwood recently concluded.

“The role of the parking structure has gone from simply being the warehouse for the cars when you weren’t using them to an integral component of an attempt to revitalize a particular area,” said Mark Winogrond, Culver City’s director of community development. “How it looks and how it fits into the street’s fabric is essential. The appearance of the parking structure is a bigger deal than it used to be.”

Culver City is choosing between two final drawings for a 386-stall garage on Cardiff Avenue in its downtown shopping district. One shows brickwork and curved arches; the other seems more modern, with more glass and straight lines. To avoid dead space, both schemes would include a sidewalk newsstand.

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Such discussions are important, stressed Hermosa Beach City Manager Stephen Burrell. “It will be a big building any way you look at it,” he said of the 450-space, $4.5-million structure being planned for 13th Street and Hermosa Avenue. “It requires a lot of care and concern.”

Planners predict that those debates will become more common in Southern California as open-air lots and curbside parking no longer accommodate demand and more residential neighborhoods require permits for parking. For example, the needs for both housing and parking were met last year in Sherman Oaks when 83 senior subsidized apartments were built on top of a new public garage at Dickens Street and Cedros Avenue, a block from a busy stretch of Ventura Boulevard.

Parking shortages led West Hollywood last year to complete a lime-green and terra cotta garage at Santa Monica Boulevard and King’s Road that might remind a passerby of a library building. The elevator lands in a separate pedestrian lobby that reduces the danger of crossing car traffic. And the 170-space, $6-million project, designed by Walker Parking Consultants and Gordon H. Chong & Partners, includes security measures that are becoming standard fare these days: glass windows in the elevator cars, emergency telephones on each floor and brighter interiors. The retail space remains empty, although the city is said to be in negotiations with a possible renter.

Elsewhere, some architects privately joke that nature had the good taste to destroy ugly and difficult-to-maneuver garages in the Northridge quake. The replacements usually display more attractive faces to the world and a more pleasant environment for motorists.

To please a generation of van drivers and offer more room for opening doors, many new shopping mall garages are abandoning smaller spaces that were reserved for compact cars. One width--8 feet, 6 inches per stall--is becoming standard. Ceiling heights are being raised a foot, to about 8 feet, and driving lanes are wider. Circular ramps, the bane of the nervous driver, are being installed less frequently than gently sloping ramps. Interior walls are being removed to make it easier to spot cars and potential muggers. Vines and trees are being planted along exterior walls to soften the look.

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The massive garages with a combined 4,500 spaces finished last fall behind the Glendale Galleria have higher ceilings, brighter lighting, more open sight lines and more-colorful exteriors than quake-damaged predecessors. Parkers are reminded of their locations through new, cheery graphics and color codings using images including red foxes and blue moons. Some parkers are still aggravated by the traffic turns but the overall sentiment is that the garages have been improved.

The goal was to avoid “a dark and dingy environment,” said architect Scott Herman of HNA/Pacific Parking consultants in Redondo Beach. “If it’s a bad parking experience, people will definitely not go back. I think most developers have learned this.”

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In Glendale and elsewhere, new seismic safety measures are not really visible to the average parker. In some projects, those involve more pouring of concrete in place instead of using precast forms, some of which did not survive the temblor. Others are using strengthened precast pieces. Vertical steel girders are being wrapped with more support bars to prevent buckling. And the number of linkages between floors, frames and supports are being increased.

The parking industry measures costs per parking stall. New seismic safety features add only about $150 to costs that usually range between $5,000 and $8,000 for an above-ground space, according to Charles M. Bolden, president of International Parking Design. Underground, construction costs can be double or triple.

The price of the underground garage at the proposed Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles remains a painful subject. The total rose to $76 million--or about $32,000 for each of its 2,370 spaces--in part because of the street tunneling and difficult excavations required for its six levels below 1st Street and Grand Avenue. But critics also fume at such lavish appointments as the dramatic clay-colored lobby and stainless-steel escalators. The county was counting on parking fees from concert audiences to help pay off the bonds it issued to build the garage. Instead, the losses to taxpayers are mounting.

At Disney Hall and other new garages, the theory was that parkers deserve a better environment than they often find.

“It’s our feeling that the parking structure is the first and last experience the guest will have of the project,” said Robert Paternoster, director of Long Beach’s Queensway Bay development. “And it ought to be a pleasant one.”