Archinect - News

A nationwide shortage of garage doors leaves new residential construction projects stuck open

2022-02-18T14:56:00-05:00

A single house under construction in America today faces all kinds of problems, starting with a run on lumber, then bricklayers in demand, subcontractors with Covid, appliances on back order and plumbing fixtures out at sea. [...] The home-building industry is having the most difficult time in decades meeting demand, the sum of many pandemic complications. But this moment reaches peak absurdity with garage doors.

Architects have been active in calling to attention some of the extreme challenges put to them by the pandemic economy. Particularly, construction of new buildings has been affected by the cost and availability of lumber and other important building materials, which have risen by about 20% for most contractors between FY 2020 to 2021.

Garage doors are holding up the inspection process primarily due to the standard-fare safety mechanisms that automatically prevent the doors from closing if anything (or anyone) strays into their sensors. The delays have pushed the average construction timeline back by months. A study from John Burns Real Estate Consulting cited by the Times stated that garage doors are third behind only home appliances and light fixtures on a list of products that rely more on imported components and complex supply chains.

“It used to take us 20 weeks to build a house,” Brookfield Properties development group CEO Adrian Foley told the Times. “And now it takes us 20 w...

Faulders Studio's striking facade adds rowdy patterning to Miami's Wynwood arts district

2020-02-07T13:36:00-05:00

In recent years, thanks to advances in material specification, graphic appliqué, and building technologies, large, anonymous buildings around the country have been converted into canvases for designers and artists through new experiments in facade design. Oakland-based architecture practice Faulders Studio has helped transform an 8-story building, designed by Wolfber Alvarez & Partners, into a striking visual beacon in Miami's artsy Wynwood district, offering one example of this new approach.

Wynwood is not only the home of Miami's arts district, but is also the area with the largest concentration of street art in the United States. With the new architectural skin Thom Faulders and his team created for this 250,000 mixed-use building, it's non-repeating pattern adds to the district's lively and creative environment.

Image © Moris Moreno. Courtesy of Goldman Properties/Faulders Studio.

Archinect's previous coverage of the project back in 2016 focused on the project's aim to integrat...

What's new, Miami? A look at the city's latest A-list architecture additions.

2018-12-04T13:37:00-05:00

Miami’s newest wave of designs could be its most ambitious yet. Fitting for a place that cherishes A-listers, virtually every celebrity architect in the world, and many rising stars, have built there in the last decade. The big names include Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & De Meuron, Grimshaw, César Pelli, Richard Meier, Arquitectonica, Rafael Moneo, Jean Nouvel and Bjarke Ingels. The impressive results are scattered citywide, from Miami Beach to the thriving Design District.

Sam Lubell takes a stroll from Downtown Miami to the Design District to Miami Beach for a NYT roundup of (fairly) recent additions to the city's impressive portfolio of landmark buildings by noteworthy architects, including Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage, OMA's Faena Forum arts center, Zaha Hadid Architects's One Thousand Museum condo tower, Grimshaw's Frost Science Museum, and, of course, the exuberant Museum Garage with facade contributions by J. Mayer H, WORKac, and others.

Garages, so hot right now.

Related: Listen to our podcast episode about Miami's garages, in our conversation with Thom Faulders of Faulders Studio.

America is building more for cars than people

2017-09-18T19:10:00-04:00

It’s hard to escape the irony that the U.S., which will need something like 43 million new housing units to keep up with population growth in the next 35 years, is using space to build apartment-size garages, even as trends in ride-sharing and self-driving cars cast a measure of uncertainty on American car culture.

Despite housing shortages and rent increases, 24% of the new homes completed in 2015 in the US included a garage for 3 or more vehicles. Since 1992, when the census started tracking this, more 3-car garages than 1-bedroom apartments have been built. With the ever-increasing need for housing, and uncertain future of car ownership, these large garages could be transformed into living or working spaces.

Car-less apartment renters pay 16% of their rent for parking that they don't use

2017-07-18T18:43:00-04:00

The average price of building a garage parking space (as much as $34,000 in 2012) is passed on to people whether they own a car or not, and distort the true demand for urban parking.

According to the 2011 National American Housing Survey data of the US census, about 16% of a housing unit’s monthly rental cost is attributable to the expense of building an urban parking spot. For the average renter that amounts to to $1,700 per year, or $142 per month.

Parking mandates increase housing prices by displacing area that could have gone to housing (thus shrinking supply), and makes each new unit more expensive to pay for more garage parking. A separate study in Los Angeles found the city’s parking minimums raised apartment prices by about $200 per month and price of a condo by about $43,000. Renters without cars end up subsidizing this arrangement to the tune of about $440 million annually in the US. While only 7% of US rental households lack cars, according to Census data, this burden falls most heavily on the urban poor since lower-income households can least afford to subsidize garage parking spaces.

Researchers find that it might be less wasteful to price and sell ...

From housing cars to housing people: the case for designing adaptable parking garages

2016-11-09T15:57:00-05:00

LMN Architects [...] wants the tower to survive 50 to 100 years. “If that’s the case, we do need to make sure—I feel we do have have the responsibility—that if the parking uses do change, we design to be able to adapt to that change,” [...] the coming transformation to a car-free-ish future. With rideshare, bikeshare, carshare, increasing transit options, and fully automated vehicles on the horizon, cities are less eager to allocate precious space for empty, parked cars.

LMN Architects' proposed Seattle tower — potentially the tallest on the West Coast — previously in the Archinect news:

The new OMA-designed Garage Museum opens in Moscow

2015-06-12T17:47:00-04:00

The design is relatively straightforward and free of OMA’s usual quirky structural tricks, once you get past the sliding entrance portals. Plywood-lined steps...lead you to an educational area, where visitors can explore the Garage digital archive, and back down the terraced levels of a bookshop. Up on the main gallery floor, there’s a big open space, currently filled with ping-pong antics...When the building is finally completed in [Sept.], a big red staircase will lead up to an open roof-deck.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened this week in Moscow. Described by Rem Koolhaas as "not restoring the building, but preserving its decay," the OMA-helmed intervention comprised sheathing a Soviet-era restaurant in a polycarbonate skin. Funded by Dasha Zhukova, the museum is launching with exhibits by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yayoi Kusama, and Taryn Simon.

Previously on Archinect:

Buy Condo, Then Add Parking Spot for $1 Million

2014-09-10T13:17:00-04:00

A new development, 42 Crosby Street, is pushing the limits of New York City real estate to new heights with 10 underground parking spots that will cost more per square foot than the apartments being sold upstairs. At $250,000 a tire, the parking spaces in the underground garage cost more than four times the national median sales price for a home, which is $217,800, according to Zillow.

The best thing about this article was the NYT pop up ad for luxury condos in Chelsea.

James Bond-style Pond and Parking Garage Entrance by HOSPER

2012-07-26T18:07:00-04:00

Earlier this week, we featured the urban square design GENK C-m!ne by Dutch landscape and urban design firm HOSPER. Here's another project by them we really enjoyed: an almost 8,000 square foot ornamental pond on top of an underground parking garage which rivals any James Bond supervillan lair. The fascinating garage entrance, which has won multiple design awards, is part of the larger urban and landscape master plan HOSPER drew up for the land of the historic Hageveld Estate, near Amsterdam.

Facebook's Garage Billions

2011-06-24T13:52:59-04:00

Garages, of course, hold a storied place in Silicon Valley lore. Think Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG), which all started in garages. The start-up garage is a powerful symbol of the do-it-yourself underdog, and the creative, collaborative and scrappy culture they hope to reinforce through the renovation of the 57-acre former Sun Microsystems campus and new construction on an adjacent 22-acre parcel over the next few years.

I couldn't see architects' name in approx. 1000 words article. Only words come from John Tenanes, the director of global real estate facilities who is overseeing the project...