TRADING SPACES
New underground garage opens at MFAH, while an old one closes
While many Houstonians anticipated a wave of street flooding Monday, Willard Holmes was confident that the new underground parking garage at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston would be fine.
Holmes, the museum’s chief operating officer, is overseeing a massive museum expansion that has snarled traffic for months near the intersection of Bissonnet and Montrose, where the new building for the Glassell School of Art is under construction.
The parking garage underneath the dramatic new 80,000-square foot building holds two levels of parking that are burrowed 35 feet underground. During street flooding situations, water pressure at the entrance triggers a flood gate that rises through the concrete.
“That’s our last line of defense,” Holmes said during a tour of the site Saturday.
Not visible is the 3-foot barrier of sand around the perimeter of the entire Glassell structure, which improves drainage and directs water toward wells that have been drilled around the perimeter and are operated by natural gas generators in a new, block-shaped central plant that hovers 26 feet above ground at the rear of the property.
“If the plant floods, we’re all in trouble,” Holmes said.
With 285 pay parking spaces on two levels, the garage replaces the 220-space surface lot at the corner of Bissonnet and Main, which closed at midnight Sunday. The museum breaks ground there May 21 on its new Kinder exhibition building.
Parking was free, and often a free-for-all, at that surface lot. The museum also has a multistory pay garage at the corner of Binz and Fannin, although some of it is blocked off for cranes needed during the construction of a new art conservation center on the roof.
Still to come: Another 120 spaces under the Kinder building, whose parking will connect to the Glassell’s. Two new “art tunnels” eventually will connect both new buildings to the other exhibition buildings. The Glassell is slated to open in January. Holmes expects the Kinder to be operating by late 2019.
For the rest of 2017, those who park in the new Glassell garage will take its south elevator up to an enclosed crosswalk that leads them into the Cullen Sculpture Garden, where they will cross Bissonnet to enter the museum. When the Glassell is finished, that elevator and another will open into the building.
Visitors will pay $10 for four hours of parking in the new garage, using kiosks with scanners. Museum members will pay $6.
The new lot is operated digitally and records license plates as cars enter the garage. That information feeds into the database, so the museum can track exactly who is visiting, and for how long, as well as calculating the right payment. Holmes said the license plate recognition also will allow the museum to quickly calculate parking charges for visitors who lose their parking tickets.
The lot, which is across the street from the Prosperity Bank, has an address of 5101 Montrose.
Access is easiest driving north; those driving south, toward Main, will turn left into the new garage. Holmes said the city has not yet decided if it will install a traffic light there, although it has approved the construction of a new controlled pedestrian crosswalk across Montrose, nearby.
The new underground lot and the Glassell building are one integrated structure, a design that made it more economical and increased space, Holmes said.
The Glassell’s form is made from 140 pre-cast concrete panels, every one different; they contain about 70 windows, and no two windows are the same. The panels range from 23,000 to 40,000 pounds each. When they are complete and tied in, their load will be spread.
“Everything supports everything else,” Holmes said.
Until the building above is complete, garage visitors will see temporary steel support “screw jacks” at critical points in the garage structure, and a pair of big, closed-off “closets” that contain the bases of crane towers.
“Until we tie everything together, everything doesn’t have its integrity,” Holmes said.
Glass vestibules surround the elevators, and architect Steven Holl also gave the garage a subtle aesthetic charge by delineating the parking spaces with lines made of small circles.