One architect?s proposal for ?a place that would be interesting for playing? When landscape architect and Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Sergio Lopez-Pineiro lived in Buffalo, New York, he lived very near one particular parking structure. It was a normal parking structure, nothing out of the ordinary, except that its raison d?etre?the hospital it had once served?had been demolished a few years earlier. The parking structure was empty, its sloping ramps unpopulated, the long, flat floors on either end fallow.
?I started thinking of it as a place that would be interesting for playing,? said Lopez-Pineiro. ?For a spontaneous, unregulated activity, where the unexpected happens?which is the opposite of parking, which works a little bit like a machine and is all based on standards and dimensions.? And once the mental shift had occurred, the possibilities appeared: a space to be used for playing or jogging, sheltered from the rain in inclement weather, covered in the coldest months by a seasonally-installed fabric bubble of the sort that keeps tennis courts playable in the winter. The space would morph and shift according to the needs of the surrounding community. It would be, essentially, the urban iteration of an empty field.

Courtesy Sergio Lopez-Pineiro

The very conditions that create the demand for a parking structure ensure the utility of one like his Buffalo inspiration. Generally, he explains, ?parking structures are built because ...