The primary goal of the Medford Garage Feasibility Study was to improve parking management in Medford Square, and ultimately to enhance patron access to local shops, restaurants, and businesses. The project team, consisting of urban designers from Utile and traffic and transportation planners from Nelson\Nygaard, determined the need for a new modestly-sized municipal garage in the Square by collecting and analyzing current parking utilization data. Once the need was established, the team worked closely to identify the best site for the new structure and to define its capacity and parking layout. While Nelson\Nygaard worked to embed the logic of a new parking garage within an overall parking management strategy for the downtown core, Utile explored two divergent options for the architectural expression of the garage. At the request of the client, Utile developed a brick facade strategy intended to fit in to the surrounding context. Simultaneously, the team forwarded a green screen option in which a vegetated screen envelops the structure while still allowing light and air to penetrate the garage.
Public open houses and meetings helped set priorities for the study.
A parking utilization analysis (below) by Nelson\Nygaard revealed underutilized parking on the edges of the Medford Square.
Nelson/Nygaard, the parking and transportation consultant, determined that through parking management alone Medford Square could gain approximately 30 additional parking spaces.
Four sites were evaluated as potential garage locations. The Governors Avenue site was chosen for the further study, and the team then evaluated the pedestrian connections between the proposed new garage site and the Chevalier Theatre.
The representational strategy of the Medford Square Feasibility Project strayed from Utile’s conventional standard for project representation. As team members delved further into the design of two distinct strategies for garage appearance and facade logic, they realized that the preferred abstracted, line drawing mode typically used to represent design ideas lacked a sense of realism that the project’s audience needed. In order to effectively convey Utile’s design intentions, the team focused its energy on producing a small set of photorealistic renderings that lent material realism to the drawings. Utile then used this select set of realistic drawings as a mental map against which our audience could then compare a collection of more schematic line drawings depicting complementary views and other aspects of both designs. The project’s graphic strategy also included a distillation of extremely complex traffic and parking diagrams.
Two facade options were generated, a brick garage and a green garage option.
