CARPARK FUTURES : OPPORTUNITIES IN THE UNDERGROUND
2020 • For Indigo Group

UPDATE - A NEW COMPETITION ON CARPARK FUTURES FOR YOUNG ARCHITECTS

CARPARK FUTURES COMPETITION

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What will the car parks of the mobility revolution look like ?

DPA–X and Dominique Perrault spent over six months working with Indigo Group to propose an urban vision that answers the challenges of future mobility and urban density in the larger sense.

Underground carparks are always overlooked in architecture and urbanism although many urban centres rely on them in many ways. Indeed, the introduction of underground car parks in dense city centres from the 1970s onwards enabled private vehicles to be integrated into urban fabrics that predated the car. The underground proved to be the obvious zone to include the new mass mobility technology that was the car. Underground spaces built for these reasons represent significant surface, volume and land reserves, whose potential is all the more incredible when considering the needs in terms of mobility and ecology of contemporary cities.

It was only natural for Dominique Perrault to place his field of expertise at the service of Indigo Group considering his career-long interest in the underground in architecture with the concept of ‘Groundscape’ and through projects like the French National Library in Paris or EWHA University in Seoul.

The main proposition of the study is that tomorrow’s carparks will no longer be simple inert storage spaces. They will be multi-purpose hubs for new mobilities and infrastructural spaces for an optimised urbanism. Existing and future underground carparks will host new programmes: logistics areas (deliveries, storage), mobility services (maintenance, recharge), energy management (geothermal, electricity, water), as well as new uses (services, work, production). Architecture will undeniably add value to the underground by bringing natural air and light.

This study on underground car parks for Indigo Group is an opportunity to broaden the scope of Groundscape architectural principles on a more systematic urban scale. The strategies proposed are inspired by the long history of ‘street sections’ realised by architects but extend this understanding of urbanism to squares, avenues and blocks. The diversification of the programmatic capacity of the subsoil allows to introduce the concept of Sub_Estate, the precious “subterranean real estate” below the city floor that can be accessed through innovations in terms of safety, regulation, mapping and ownership. Finally, the study is a call to think cities as system rooted in the ground, which opens up for an age of deep urbanism.

Download the PDF report : English-Chinese & English-Français

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