Parking Ramps- few are good, most are bad and ugly. Like outdated shopping malls, there is always a fix for ugly. And nobody seems to do parking ramps like Santa Monica where a ‘green’ parking ramp opened last year. The California city recently approved make-over plans for two dreadful downtown ramps.
The Santa Monica garages were completed in 1980 to coincide with the opening of Frank Gehry-designed Santa Monica Place shopping mall. To coincide with a mall make-over, the City’s Redevelopment Agency commissioned the architectural firm of Pugh + Scarpa to design proposed façade improvements to parking structures “7 and 8.”
The overall intent of the façade remodels is to create unique identities for the parking facilities. Each will receive new synthetic lumber veneers, stairway enclosures composed of colored channel glass, and new street-level retail space.
There is more. Up to approximately 275 bicycle parking spaces are expected to be created in the ramps. Solar photovoltaic systems will be also affixed to overhead canopies on the roof levels, providing cooling shade for vehicles and pedestrians and electricity savings which further the City’s Solar Initiative. A large art component is proposed which will add to the visual interest of the streetscape.
The cost for final design and construction of the façade improvements is estimated to total approximately $5.5 million.
Buffalo has a fair number of parking ramps, some would say too many, with more likely to be built at Canal Side and in the Medical Campus in the near future. Santa Monica may be putting lipstick on a pig, but the city shows that ramps both new and old do not need to be bland.