Pugh + Scarpa was commissioned to design improvements to eight parking garages surrounding the popular 3rd Street Promenade of Santa Monica. The improvements include new facades, improved pedestrian access, sculptural signage by Cliff Garten Studio and other public artists, enhanced LED lighting for safety and aesthetics, and ground floor retail. The projects will afford a much more convivial and welcoming experience for residents and for the millions of visitors the city receives every year.
The firm’s work on parking garages 7 and 8 extends and complements several design legacies of greater Los Angeles and are in keeping with Santa Monica’s image as a vibrant, progressive, forward-thinking community. The redesign of the garages will preserve the iconic steel mesh signage created by Frank Gehry, while updating many other aesthetic and functional features for the 21st century.
We provoke a conversation between the parking garage and its urban context, between pedestrian and garage, cyclist and motorist. These include the installation of bike racks and bicycle-oriented retail along the ground floor corners and other high-traffic areas, activating the street edges of the structures and encouraging Santa Monicans and visitors to participate in a multimodal, green future.
Both garages adjoin and serve the Frank Gehry-designed Santa Monica Place, a 1980s indoor shopping mall that is currently being “daylighted” by Jerde Partnership. The new Santa Monica Place will build upon the success of the 3rd Street Promenade and Southern California’s ideal outdoor shopping climate, creating a more walkable and street-like atmosphere. To reflect this integrated effort, new pedestrian flyovers will connect the garages to the reconfigured shopping center, and design facets of the garages will be synthesized with the surface treatments of Santa Monica Place to communicate an integrated whole. Horizontal bands of earth-toned terra cotta on the buildings will melt into interpolating brises-soleil slats and bands of colored channel glass on the garages. The slats, just one of many green features of the redesigned garages, will be made of recycled plastic formed into screens resembling lumber pallets.
The green cause is also assisted by the installation of solar-panel-equipped overhead canopies on the top parking levels, providing cooling shade for vehicles and pedestrians as well as electric energy for the complex and the city. The garages are more than utilitarian structures. They are essentially giant display walls, and the new design will exploit this feature, showcasing the work of accomplished public artists, such as Ball-Nogues Studio and Anne Marie Karlsen.
