How green should a garage be?

In the mid-1990s, Miami Beach had a problem. The city wanted to expand the tight parking supply of the tourist-filled South Beach Art Deco Historic District, but not erect a structure that people would consider ugly or dull. The answer, designed by Arqui-tectonica for the city and Goldman Properties, was the Seventh Street Garage — a building that combines 25,000 square feet of ground-level retail with six stories of parking encased in plastic mesh. Three kinds of vegetation were planted along the parking structure’s perimeter. As they’ve grown, they’ve transformed the building into what looks, from a distance, like a green mountain. “We affectionately call it ‘the Chia Pet Garage,’” Miami Beach Parking Director Saul Frances says of the five-year-old structure on Collins Avenue and Seventh Streets. “It costs about $27,000 to give it a haircut every six months.” Old storefronts on Collins Avenue were preserved and new ones were added, creating a strip of nine high-end shops (including Benetton and Vidal Sassoon). The stores opening onto palm tree-lined sidewalks have maintained South Beach’s walkable character. The 646 parking spaces have disappeared behind a dense green zone of silver buttonwood, dwarf clusia, and scaevola. Call it urban topiary. “It’s very well liked, which is pretty amazing, considering that it’s surrounded by mostly two-story buildings,” says Randall Robinson Jr., a planner with the Miami Beach Community Development Corp. New urbanist designer Andy Kunz, a South Beach resident for many years, expresses misgivings. “From an urban design standpoint, the building is a bit odd in that when you look down the road at it, it looks like a giant square green mountain, and it doesn’t really fit into an urban area very well.” “A freak in the urban fabric,” in Kunz’s estimation, the leafy garage brings to mind one of Andres Duany’s arguments — that each building and landscape should fit its context, on a transect ranging from urban to rural. Kunz prefers the 17th Street Garage, which the Miami Beach architecture firm Zyskovich designed on Collins Avenue across from the Loews Hotel. “It fits right in,” he says, “because it is built up to the sidewalk, is lined with retail on the bottom, the drive entrance is somewhat small and hidden, and the openings are shaped like windows.” Kunz’s verdict: “It looks like a building.”