Apparently, Miami is hellbent on being home to all of the world’s coolest parking garages. It’s already famous for 1111 Lincoln Road, a landmark gem by Swiss firm Herzog de Meuron that hosts fashion shows, music videos, orchestral performances and interactive art installations in addition to parked vehicles. Arquitectonica’s Ballet Valet garage is world-renowned for its lush greenery. Then there’s the City View Garage in Miami’s Design District, which boasts four different designs on each of its four facades.
Now, a facility that looked a little too wacky to be real in its initial renderings is complete, and it’s really something else.
Just two blocks away from the City View Garage, the new Museum Garage is open after two years of planning and construction. Five architecture and design firms designed five radically different facades for the structure: Nicolas Buffe, Clavel Aquitectos, J. Mayer H., WORKac and Keenan/Riley. Standing seven stories tall and capable of holding 800 cars, the surrealist garage is a colorful mashup of shapes and styles.
Architect Terence Riley ‘curated’ the facade designs for DACRA and LVMH, and says he describes the impact of the garage as “a bucket of cold water.” It’s shocking, but also refreshing, especially in steamy South Florida. A sense of a cohesive whole wasn’t really a priority – each of the five designers worked on their individual segments without seeing what others were creating.
Riley says he drew inspiration from an old Surrealist parlor game called Exquisite Corpse, in which one artist draws a head on a piece of paper, folds it to hide what they’ve drawn and passes it to the next artist to draw another segment of the body. Nobody sees it as a whole until the final part is complete.
The garage is located on the corner of NE 1st Avenue and NE 41st Street. In addition to offering public parking at a reasonable rate of $3 for 4 hours, the facility includes mixed-use spaces on the ground level. Fittingly, it faces the new Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.
Captions via the Miami Design District
