Park and chill : redesign parking garage in Hong Kong

Abstract

What are the aesthetics of urban infrastructure? Urban infrastructure has remained isolated to human activities. We all share memory and experience with urban infrastructure, e.g. we drive on the same roads and park our cars in the same parking garage every day. Urban infrastructure are not important or great places for us because they are designed by non-human factors, but by requirement of cars. One can question why we need to make urban infrastructure to become a better place? The answer is that urban infrastructure often occupies important geographical location in the cities for distribution of cars, human, water and energy. In a dense urban environment, the high land value makes the creation of non-commercial buildings and places, such as religion, cemetery, playground and parks, being enormous difficult. These activities can only occupy less prominent locations in cities. In addition, public programs nowadays is mostly tied with consumption of goods, services and cultural activities. If urban infrastructure is one of the necessities in center of urban environment and lack enough human consideration while we all share experience with them, can we take this situation as an opportunity to redefine the role of urban infrastructure. Can urban infrastructure be a civic building? This thesis aims at resolving the dilemma that non-commercial driven public programs are difficult to exist in high density urban environment because of high land price. This thesis proposes hybridizing parking garage with non-commercial public programs. The transformation to suit the need of human need and technical requirement provides new opportunities for searching didactic forms and sublime techniques. Also, if the purpose of building more roads and highway is to speed up the time of moving around the city, the parking garage is a place where cars stop. This thesis propose to use parking garage to slow down people's life in the city. It is a place where people can take a rest from the network of driving and escape from our busy city life.