Multistorey car park
[6] The earliest known multi-storey car park was opened in May 1901 by City & Suburban Electric Carriage Company at 6 Denman Street, central London.
The design loads for car parks are often less than the office building they serve (50 psf versus 80 [100] psf), leading to long floor spans of 55–65 feet that permit cars to park in rows without supporting columns in between [called long span].
This saves land for other uses (as opposed surface parking), is cheaper and more practical in most cases than a separate structure, and is hidden from view.
It protects customers and their cars from weather such as rain, snow, or hot summer sunshine that raises a vehicle's interior temperature to extremely high levels.
Underground parking of only two levels was considered an innovative concept in 1964, when developer Louis Lesser developed a two-level underground parking structure under six 10-storey high-rise residential halls at California State University, Los Angeles, which lacked space for horizontal expansion in the 176-acre (0.71 km2) university.
[12][13] In Toronto, a 2,400 space underground parking structure below Nathan Phillips Square is one of the world's largest.
One example is Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA, which has two large parking lots attached to the building, at the eastern and western ends.
On 15 December 2013, a man was killed during a robbery in the parking garage at The Mall at Short Hills in Millburn, New Jersey.
[5] Parking structures are subjected to the heavy and shifting loads of moving vehicles, and must bear the associated physical stresses.
In July 2009 a fourth-floor section failed at the Centergy building in midtown Atlanta, pancaking down and destroying more than 30 vehicles but injuring no-one.
[16] In November 2008, the sudden collapse of the middle level of a deck in Montreal was preceded by warning signs some weeks before, including cracks and water leaks.
[17] In June 2012, the Algo Centre Mall's rooftop parking deck collapsed into the building, crashing through the upper level lottery kiosk adjacent to the food court and escalators to the ground floor below, killing two people.
[18] In October 2012 four people were killed and nine more injured when a parking structure under construction at a campus of Miami-Dade College in Florida collapsed,[19] purportedly due to an unfinished column.
[20] The Surfside condominium's main building's collapse that killed ninety-eight people was likely caused by the failure of the long-term degradation of reinforced concrete structural support in the basement-level parking garage.
Decorations may include using of covers to close the holes in the precast concrete that contains the lifting anchors, and installing facades to the exterior of the structures.
Another example is the use of carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer to replace steel wire mesh to lighten the load and yield more corrosion resistance especially for the cold-climate areas which use salt for melting snow.
As Architectural Record has noted, "In the Pantheon of Building Types, the parking garage lurks somewhere in the vicinity of prisons and toll plazas.
[24] A handful of structures have received considerable praise for their design, including The term multistorey car park (often abbreviated to multistorey or multistory)[3] is used in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and many Commonwealth of Nations countries, and it is nowadays most commonly spelled without a hyphen.
[31] Natural or mechanical ventilation provides fresh air flow to disperse car exhaust in normal conditions, or hot gas and smoke in case of fire.
The earliest use of an automated parking system (APS) was in Paris in 1905 at the Garage Rue de Ponthieu.
[33] A 1931 Popular Mechanics article speculated about design for an underground garage where the car is taken to a parking area by a conveyor and then an elevator to shuttles mounted on rails.
These include adaptive lighting, sensors and parking space LED indicators (red for occupied, green for available and blue is reserved for the disabled; above every parking space), indoor positioning system (IPS), including QR code, and mobile payment options.
The Santa Monica Place shopping mall in California has cameras on each stall that can help count the lot occupancy and find lost cars.
They use real-time inventory management checking technology to display car parks with availability, sorted by price and distance from the airport.
The ship was given the new name P-Arken (a pun on the words park and ark) and it is permanently towed in Gothenburg's harbour Lilla Bommen near Skeppsbron.
[47][48] In October 2009, the National Building Museum opened an exhibition solely devoted to the study of parking garages and their impact on the built environment.
