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Bing Thom Architects Make a University Parking Garage a Good Neighbor

<a href='http://www.bingthomarchitects.com/'>Bing Thom Architects'</a> latest project offers up a well-resolved optical design illusion: making a troublesome building type nearly disappear in an urban, academic site. The Vancouver-based practice’s newest completed work nestles a 380,000-square-foot parking garage into a hillside, topped with a green soccer and recreation field at ground level on the Calgary campus of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, thus minimizing the scale and footprint of the building, while maintaining views to nearby historic campus buildings. Image courtesy of Peter Beech.

The building's metal screen façade was designed by Bing Thom Architects and Vancouver artist Roderick Quin. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

The pixilated façade is created by thousands of holes that have been punched through a metal screen, allowing in natural light and outside breezes. The holes reflect light at different angles, and up close have a strong tactile, textural richness. But from far away, the composite effect resembles two-dimensional renderings of clouds or abstract painting. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

Only the east and south sides of the parkade are fully visible, creating a green roof that extends over the structure. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

Glass pyramids articulate the staircases and create atria that allow natural light down into the structure. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

These glass pyramids lead to light-filled atriums that link to the parking structure. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

The roof level of the building is the same as the ground level of the adjacent Neo Gothic Heritage Hall. This keeps the profile of the parking garage quiet and deferent, stopping it from blocking views of the historic campus centerpiece. However, in the triangular atrium entrances Bing Thom, AIA, also designed the structure to include angular, Modernist expanses of glass that offer a rich material and formal contrast to the early 20th century building. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

Thom’s design sensibilities often favor curved, sculpted forms to direct and rectilinear ones, but in the garage atriums he mixes glass and concrete boldly and bluntly, in a classical Modernist way. Since the death of his mentor Arthur Erickson, FAIA, Thom is perhaps Canada’s most celebrated architect, and his ingenuity here justifies the title. It takes an agile and flexible mind free of design preconceptions to re-imagine a parking garage as a building type worthy of daylight-bleached atriums and an artist-designed façade. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

Thom (whose latest American project was the recently renovated Arena Stage Theater in Washington, DC) has said that his goal with the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology parking garage was to “humanize what might otherwise be just an enormous, soulless structure.” “Humanize” is a good word, but so is “urbanize.” Thom’s site is very urban, within eyeshot of downtown Calgary, and it acknowledges this context by mostly staying out of the way. Throughout Thom’s entire career, he’s specialized in regenerative urbanism that works on many scales, <a href='http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek09/1016/1016d_bingthom.cfm'>creating architecture that ties cities and sites together</a>. With his Calgary parking garage’s university campus site, he realized that these connections already existed, and that a monolithic, undisguised parking structure would threaten them, so he hid his building by embedding it in a hillside, adding an attractive façade, and a thin layer of public programming on top. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

Parking structures have recently wandered back into design relevance, in part because of a <a href='http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek09/0925/0925d_parkexhibit.cfm'>recent exhibition</a> at the National Building Museum and several high profile projects like Herzog and de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami and HOK’s Greenway Self Park in Chicago. These kinds of building have mostly reconsidered and reurbanized parking garages by filling them with urban programming (at 1111 Lincoln Road--event space, residences, retail space) and green gadgetry (at Greenway--wind turbines, rain water cisterns, electronic vehicle plug outlets). Thom’s parking structure takes a different approach. Even the most well-balanced programmatic mix within a garage would have stamped out and bullied the sense of campus community on Thom’s site. In its own humble way, Thom’s parking garage is a strong reminder that, sometimes, even the city needs some space to breathe. Photo by Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects.

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