The city block that is now the downtown library and parking garage has been many things over the last 75 years, and for reasons that probably made sense at the time, it is a single project, but due to historic buildings that were incorporated and over-built by previous projects, there are 4 different structures (3 expansion joints), and no original drawings, for the garage that is our scope of work. Gresham Smith & Partners is the structural engineer and prime consultant for the project, and asked Centric Architecture to partner with them to design a 350-car addition (3 levels of parking) on top of the existing operational parking garage.
The completed design has seven tiers of parking, a new MRL elevator, new stair towers, and a steel-framed garage added on top of an existing concrete framed structure. In order to tie the aesthetics of the old and new halves of the building together – while still carefully minimizing weight and cost – we added a visual screen to the building made
from multi-colored aluminum extrusions in varying orientations.
