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The Parking Garage: Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure, Santa Monica, California
“Cars aren’t going to go away tomorrow, are they?” says James Mary O’Connor, architect of the first LEED-certified parking garage, in response to the question he’s probably been asked a million times: Isn’t the very idea—a green parking garage—oxymoronic and perverse? His firm, Moore Ruble Yudell, talked the Santa Monica City Council into incorporating a bit of virtue into the 900-car building. Indeed, cars are still very much with us, taking up space and inflating our carbon footprints, so they might as well park in a garage that derives at least part of its wattage from solar panels on the rooftop shade structure, filters oil and other automobile effluvia out of storm-water runoff, has recycled fly ash in the concrete, and provides free bike-storage lockers and outlets for electric cars. But, all that aside, the multicolored glass-and-neon garage is unusually pretty. And maybe that’s the point.
