How Automated Parking Solves Design and Code Challenges for Architects
Parking codes are notoriously rigid. They dictate the number of spaces required for different building types and often leave little room for creativity. However, automated parking systems provide a unique way to meet these requirements without compromising design.
Transforming Space into Opportunity
Traditional parking structures demand valuable space, often monopolizing areas that could otherwise be used for revenue-generating purposes or creative expressions. The ramps, turning radii, and floor heights required in conventional garages impose spatial limitations that restrict design freedom.
Automated parking systems, by contrast, eliminate these inefficiencies. By utilizing compact mechanical systems to store vehicles, architects can drastically reduce the parking footprint. What once consumed entire floors, or underground levels can now be condensed into discreet, modular systems. This means more space for vibrant retail plazas, green rooftops, or additional residential units that enhance both the utility and aesthetic of a building.
Design Freedom Meets Code Compliance
By reducing the vertical and horizontal footprint needed for parking, architects can meet zoning requirements while freeing up space for other architectural elements. Whether integrating an underground automated system into a tight urban site or stacking a semi-automated puzzle parking solution in a constrained lot, these technologies allow for greater flexibility in both form and function.
Blurring the Lines Between Functionality and Aesthetics
One of the most frustrating challenges for architects is when functional requirements conflict with the visual narrative of a building. Traditional parking garages, with their blank facades and utilitarian structures, often disrupt the design harmony of a project. Automated parking systems change the equation.
Entry and exit bays can be designed as seamless extensions of a building’s architecture, integrating naturally with the overall aesthetic. Systems like Utron’s Puzzle Parking and Slide Parking are versatile enough to adapt to the material palette, whether it’s sleek steel, minimalist concrete, or even wood-paneled facades. This flexibility allows architects to not only hide the mechanics of parking but to elevate them into elements of the design.
Parking Design Inspiration: One Park, Cliffside Park, NJ
At One Park in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, residents of the luxury residential complex enter the building surrounded by trees. It is a vastly different experience from the initial design, which called for a podium parking structure that would have replaced trees with a “big box” blocking the entrance.
The final design allowed the building developers to get more out of the project by freeing designated parking space for other uses.
What made this change in design possible was Utron’s fully automated parking system. By eliminating ramps, turning radiuses, and high ceilings required in traditional garages, Utron’s system significantly reduced the parking volume. This freed up space under the complex’s south tower for parking, enabling the front entrance to be opened for greenery and enhancing the overall aesthetic.
The parking system also allowed for more residential units to be added to the shorter, connected tower of the complex, increasing the project’s profitability. Residents benefit from a safer and more convenient experience, as their cars are parked securely in a vault and retrieved at their convenience via a mobile app. For the developer and architect, the automated parking system became both a functional necessity and a design asset.
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