Parking garages increasingly getting colorful touches
garages are becoming the latest canvas for public art as developers aim to create places where people want to be.
Trademark Property Co. has carved out Instagram-worthy spots on traditionally overlooked spaces across several of its developments, including Rice Village in Houston.
“People are very against parking garages, even though they’re shaded and cooler,” said Cassie King, Trademark’s director of design and innovation. “To help change that stigma, we’ve started dressing them up more.”
Perched above a garage stairwell on Kelvin Drive, an origamilike blue metal owl by California artist Nathan Mabry is reminiscent of nearby Rice University, which owns the Trademark Property-managed shopping district.
Around the corner on Amherst, Michael C. Rodriguez’s inspirational mural of a female astronaut against the Houston skyline has become a hot spot for selfies. Prolific Houston muralist Mario Enrique Figueroa Jr., also known as Gonzo247, marked the bricks elsewhere, including a Houston Strong message on a colorful hand and heart design.
The theme of connecting with Houston is evident on other gaParking rages, too. Earlier this year, Houston-based Wedge Group commissioned international artist C. Finley for the “Sky Dance” mural on downtown’s 1415 Louisiana parking garage. The privately held investment firm collaborated with the Downtown District and the Houston Ballet on the mural, which rises 13 stories tall and depicts three ballerinas to celebrate Houston’s art scene. At 230 feet wide by 130 feet tall, it’s said to be Houston’s largest mural.
At Rice University, a recently built garage is more subtle. Angled mesh screens in a fig vine pattern cover the seven-story garage, creating a sculpture that blends in
with the heavily-treed campus along Main Street.
The Rice Village garage art is part of a plan to create an urban environment with more plazas and gathering areas, food trucks and art interspersed throughout the shops and restaurants of the 80-year-old shopping district near University Boulevard and Kirby Drive.
The Trademark projects in Rice Village and elsewhere use paint, lighting and design elements to make people feel safer and to keep them engaged and entertained, King said.
“We utilize garages in a way for not only way-finding and place-making, but overall experience because that is sometimes your front door,” King said. “It’s your first experience when you drive in property.”
In Victory Park in Dallas, a new series of geometric murals by Lesli Marshall with a different color and theme on each floor helps people remember where they parked.
The WestBend mixeduse development in Fort Worth incorporates murals by local artist Kyle Steed using quotes and references to famous Texans. One of the murals depicts a quote by Willie Nelson: “Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there.”
That’s a message that resonated with artists Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee, co-founders of Houstonbased RE:site, in their new “Prevailing Winds” installation on a five-story garage at Generation Park in northeast Houston. Part of the goal was to provide people a pause from electronics and a connection with nature by helping them visualize the wind.
“Technology is kind of taking over our lives and taking over our personal time,” Allbritton said. “Nature is animating this for us.”
The metal sculpture, made up of 4,000 blue aluminum squares attached to architectural mesh, drapes down portions of three sides of the garage in the development’s 52-acre Redemption Square district. The artists, working with the Metalab design firm, used a single color to simplify the piece. The monochromatic squares have a pixel-like quality, responding to even a gentle breeze and light conditions that vary with the clouds and time of day.
Sometimes garage art projects are part of a strategic revitalization, but not always.
“I see it in every city I go to,” Lee said. “The motivation a lot of times is the garages just look so ugly, we need something to make it not ugly.”
The Generation Park garage serves the 250 Assay office-retail building and will provide parking for the upcoming Courtyard Marriott and other buildings in the future.
The sculpture, which can be perceived as clouds moving across the sky or rippling water, provides not only shade but also a mechanism for people to find their way around as more buildings are added to the development near Beltway 8 and West Lake Houston Parkway.
“It’s something we may look at doing on other garages as part of our wayfinding,” said Ryan McCord, president of McCord Development. “Our philosophy around way-finding is to use words as infrequently as possible and to try to make the built environment as intuitive as possible.”
While the garage is ultimately a place to park, that doesn’t mean it gets a pass when it comes to design, McCord said.
“This is part of the sense of arrival. Everybody benefits if it’s enhanced architecturally,” McCord said. “People appreciate beauty. Where you have the opportunity to create it, you should.”