I won’t pretend that I understand a lot of what the Inhabitant is talking about in this story about LEED on Wikipedia. All I know is the parking garage itself is an incredible, eye-catching piece of beautiful engineering thanks to the bevy of colors and shapes the building is festooned with. While I can’t say anything about how good the building is for the actual environment, I can definitely say that it improves the visual environment more so than any gray concrete shell or creepy abandoned factory.
The article questions the worthiness of making an environmentally-friendly parking garage, but to me that doesn’t seem like a real issue. People are going to park and drive for as long as they can afford to, and obviously there’s a parking problem in that area or someone wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to make a parking garage. If you can make it environmentally friendly, why not? You could always expand the number of outlets for electric cars and add in some bicycle racks later, if you need to. I guess, to me, any little step is a step in the right direction.
Tags: parking garage, santa monica, California, LEED, architecture, buildings, unusual design