Plug-In Parking by Popular Architecture

The Office People Architecture , based in Brooklyn, shared with us his proposal for the competition Fargo Downtown Urban Infill Competition . Images and then project report. The order of competition for a mixed use building of 250,000 m2, including a parking lot for 500 cars would be run by the City of Fargo and to be built as soon as possible. Parking lots are usually treated only as functional structures and have no role in the projects, their designs emphasize its structural efficiency and maximizing space. In this case try to do something different.

Despite being almost always peripheral, in this proposal the parking lot has a central role as an intermodal node, generating the transition between moving cars and pedestrians. We think that the experience of this transition could be enhanced by selecting the largest possible latent connections. Our project achieves this by performing several simple operations on the ramp and designed by Carl Walker, on the northeast corner of the land: the first turns the ramp to the center of the field and the second between the spiral ramp, plunging three levels of underground and widening the airways system existing pedestrian in the city.

The air is expanded through a grand staircase connecting all levels above the ramp to a park on its cover. The pedestrian and the car are intertwined in their mutual benefit. The release of the perimeter of the block and the expansion of air produces a unifying space provided between the parking lot and the four buildings that eventually triggered the whole project. With the ramp, the buildings define three spaces can incorporate public programs.

Inside, generates a kind of “drive-in with shortcuts to offices, restaurants, health centers and stores, operating as an extension of the street. The ramp becomes a custom infrastructure that adapts to the specificity of their environment. The congregation of the four buildings is determined by the angle of the sun on 21 December at 12 noon (winter solstice). To maximize the benefits of winter sun for the departments of the first plants, the project proposes passive measures for heating through the insulation and air tightness, allowing the interior air heating through a heat recovery ventilator ( HRV). The overall goal is a factor of 10 in reducing energy consumption.