Green Garages: Oxymoron or Objective?
The National Building Museum’s current exhibition House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage [on view until July 11, 2010] has fostered lively discussion about the impact of these structures on cities. It has also generated debate about whether a car-oriented culture can ever be truly sustainable.
Sarah Leavitt: We are not only a museum about sustainable architecture, but also a place where people come to learn about the built environment in all its many forms. We encourage people to think about the ways in which we use buildings and the ways in which buildings inform how we build our cities.
Susan Piedmont-Palladino: Green garages—if you want to be obnoxious about it, you can say, “Green garages? Is that an oxymoron?” But I think what’s really interesting about the exhibition is that it realizes that the parking garage is a complex building type with its own history, and that we’ve always had to build structures to house our vehicles, whether it was stables for horses or sheds for trains—there’s a whole architecture of doing that. It’s just that the parking garage seems to us to be such a banal thing until you realize how complex it is and that all the things we take for granted actually have to be designed. Like any building type, it can be a contributor to improving the environment in some modest way, or it can be the lowest common denominator.Leavitt: And we’ve seen a lot of them…
Piedmont-Palladino: . . . but we’re not showing those in the exhibition…
Leavitt: Well, there’s a few that one might argue are not at the height of architectural interest or thought.
Hess: So do you honestly think that parking garages can be green?
I vastly prefer a parking garage—because of its density—to surface parking, so in that sense it’s a better urban way of dealing with a car. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not a fan of the car, but if you’re going to have them… I mean in the 19th century there were people who had that same idea about horses—they don’t belong in the city, they die in the streets, they excrete, you have to feed them, they smell…
Leavitt: They were a real environmental hazard.
Piedmont-Palladino: It’s easy to romanticize past transportation, but we do that at our peril.
Hess: Now that cars have been so dominant, Sarah, I was wondering if you could talk about the role parking garages have played in promoting such a car-dependent society in the 20th century.
Leavitt: Well, certainly, parking garages have a role to play in making it easier for people to drive. For example, I have free parking here at work (which many people don’t in downtown DC) so I could take advantage of that and drive to work. Now I do take the Metro, because it’s usually faster, but I certainly have driven once or twice. If you really wanted to prevent people from driving downtown, then you would not provide free parking or easy-to-find parking at all. But certainly the more parking that you have, the easier it is for people to drive. You can influence how people use that parking by having different costs at different times of the day, and also by being located near public transit that makes it easier for people to come by different forms of transportation during the day.
Piedmont-Palladino: You know the phrase, “If you build it, they will drive…” No jurisdiction really wants to put down the hard line and say “no parking” because they’re afraid they’re going to alienate people and starve their businesses. But what if we broaden our concept of what’s getting parked? I think that’s happening; right in the exhibition there’s a discussion of car sharing, where the car is in use constantly unlike a car that belongs to a single individual. Expanding it to include bicycle parking…
Leavitt: … and bus parking…
Hess: What is the role of parking garages in New Urbanism?
Piedmont-Palladino: There’s New Urbanism that’s greenfield New Urbanism and there’s New Urbanism that’s brownfield New Urbanism, and that’s actually old urbanism—building and recharging and infilling used places, and so theoretically there’s already infrastructure there. Ideally development should be focused where infrastructure provides choices already. Some of those choices will be roads. But if you’re developing a New Urbanist community where there’s already a bus line, a subway, bike trails, and sidewalks, then the pressure is reduced a little bit. New Urbanists would say that if you develop an acceptable density, as in a row house neighborhood, the width of a row house is about the length of a parking space, and so at a certain density, you don’t need additional structured parking. If you’ve got a row house community, technically everyone could park in front of their house. And that’s the best urban fabric—you’ve got the social life of people coming in their front doors, you’re not giving away anything else to parking, you’re not causing all sorts of strange behaviors, and you don’t have to do all the curb cuts to put garages in.
So it only works if that’s what the fabric is. Greenfield New Urbanist communities tend to be located just like other suburban developments, where most of the people are going to get in their cars to go somewhere. They might go to the nearest Metro stop and park, or they’re just going to drive all the way to work. I think the preference in those environments is for a suburban relationship to your own car—which usually means, if it’s well designed, you’ve got a garage in the back, and there’s an alley system. But my guess is that independent parking garage doesn’t mix well with single-family house developments. People aren’t used to that—they think that their house and their car go together.
Leavitt: Although in many of these communities, like Rockville, Bethesda, Gaithersburg, where they have retail, restaurants, other people coming into the community, there is a parking garage—oftentimes with a couple floors reserved for residents, and then the rest of it is for people coming in. Because the idea of those communities is that there is some kind of street life of retail, doctors’ offices, restaurants, bookstores—things like that.
Piedmont-Palladino: And those are much denser, mixed-use versions. But yeah, in a place like Bethesda or Arlington along the Metro lines, where you can build big enough to accommodate cars, retail, offices, and housing, and STILL have good sidewalk life, the risk is when the parking garage is treated as a building that people only get to by car. If there is no humane way that pedestrians can get to it, or it’s not integrated in the urban fabric, that’s when they’re a problem.
Piedmont-Palladino: Well, the subtitle of the parking garage exhibition includes “parking garages” not “fun on subways.” And in Green Community we did try to bring in some of the consequences (intended and unintended) of policies that are designed to make communities greener. Density and transit-oriented development, which were valued highly in Green Community, have the consequence of raising housing costs, because such neighborhoods are more desirable, but that always has to be balanced by the fact that if you’re living there you don’t have to pay $7,000-10,000 a year owning a car. So you can say that you can tell both sides of the story, but you also have to tell the whole story.
In Green Community we had criteria for including the communities we represented, and no one got “in the club” if their community was not served by mass transit. The degree to which everyone in those communities really used it all the time was something we couldn’t really monitor, however. There’s an attempt to be intellectually honest with these issues, and to have as clear a narrative about what you’re presenting, what the issues are, and how a variety of people are making decisions. But I don’t feel shy about passing judgment on a better way—I mean I don’t think in House of Cars there’s any pretense that we shouldn’t be doing better.
Leavitt: And in Green Community you said that each of the examples has green aspects but none of them are totally green—that’s stated right up front—in none of these communities have we gotten rid of all our faults, whether it’s dependence on the car or whatever else. That’s certainly also true in House of Cars—I don’t think it ignores all of these issues that we have been discussing. I did specifically point out the horse pollution issue in the first gallery because I think that’s vital to understanding first that these things aren’t inevitable; that history doesn’t just happen in a certain way. We make these choices, and there are reasons people preferred the car over the horse, and over the transportation options they had before, both because it’s faster and also because they were living in cities that were polluted by the previous choices that people had made, so they were looking for something else.
Piedmont-Palladino: Going back to Green Community, there’s the argument that cities are good. We can say that now in the post-industrial era. We made the point in Green Community that 19th-century that cities were pretty nasty places, not only with dead horses, but also with unregulated factories, poor health care, poor air quality, poor water quality. Those issues were all addressed in the progressive era. Sarah’s point is a good one: these things don’t just happen—they are deliberate technological, political, cultural steps. Once we have a certain distance, where cars have been around for awhile now, people look back and say, “Well, the things we thought were going to happen may have happened, along with a bunch of other things that we didn’t know would happen.” And whatever we’re deciding is a great idea now—there are internal contradictions to those things that we’ll see play out in the next generation or so.
Leavitt: This was a great time to look back at the 20th century—maybe that will be the car century and maybe in the 21st century we will be moving on to something else. Hopefully we will be layering the car with other forms of transportation—we’re already doing that. And I think it was a great opportunity to look back at the last 100 years and to pose that question at the end of the exhibition, “Where do we go from here and what comes next?” So we can use this thoughtful discussion to move on to something better.
Piedmont-Palladino: None of us likes to be dependent on anything. So maybe we can move from car dependence, which is not a healthy relationship, to choices. I’ve always thought that we should think of cars the way people think of boats. You have a boat, because boats are fun, but you don’t use your boat all the time (unless you make your living in your boat). But a boat is a recreational vehicle and when people are in boats, and they pass each other, they wave and they smile—it would be nice if people in cars would behave more like people in boats. So my theory is that when we move more to thinking of our cars like boats, then they become more interesting, and we have a more creative relationship with them.
But we also want people to live in environments where they can have a choice. There are all sorts of people who can’t drive for a variety of reasons—they’re teenagers, they’re elderly, visually impaired, have other issues—and they shouldn’t be marginalized as citizens because they can’t drive. So parking structures will probably be part of our urban environment forever—and even if they’re all electric, there will be some sort of personal transportation vehicle. But our urban fabric shouldn’t be totally dependent on that. Otherwise we end up building all parking garages and wonder, once you get out of your car, “What did I come here for?”
Hess: Any last thoughts about the subject of green garages? What about LEED certification—is that possible, is that good?
Leavitt: It’s a funny argument: I know we’ve talked to people who come in and think that LEED certification shouldn’t apply to parking garages. To me that seems silly because I think we should be encouraging architects and city planners and developers to look at all of those issues, and the more we do that the more it becomes inherent in what we do. The more that these structures are all multi-use and off the grid with solar power, and have stormwater runoff control, which some places are doing, I think that’s all to the good. That’s probably not possible for every garage, depending on where it is, but more developers are being trained to look for those types of things, and that seems to be good.
Leavitt: A lot of that is money—people will say that’s expensive, but you could argue that if they can produce their solar power and light their own facility, then that should work in their favor.
Piedmont-Palladino: Because there’s money to be made doing it, and there are a lot of clever developers out there who would do it. And then of course they market themselves as the greenest, cleanest parking garages.
Hess: And there are already people out there working on making electric ports—like electrical contracting companies who normally have never done anything with parking garages that are now specializing in plugs for parking garages because it’s the new wave.
Piedmont-Palladino: And they want to be first. So there’s really no contradiction in having a show on parking garages right after Green Community. It’s fascinating stuff… who knew? Not that I drive… so I look at it with a kind of anthropological detachment!
Hess: It’s always interesting to think that every solution you have for a problem creates more problems, but you can continue to solve them.
Piedmont-Palladino: Which is why architects will never run out of things to do.
