Parking for an ever evolving city

700 Jackson Street: A new car park in Dallas, Texas, has been designed with the potential for future expansion

Car parks can be more than places to store cars. When designed with a sense of vision and purpose they can become iconic symbols of commerce, public service and regeneration. This was the ethos adopted by the team that created the garage serving 700 Jackson Street, a multi-phase, mixed-use development in Dallas, Texas.

Corgan, an architecture firm with a national footprint across the USA, has sought to create a garage design that aspires to be both a work of art and a state-of-the-art parking facility.

The development, which is owned by Serra, consists of ground-level restaurant and retail spaces, which enhance the pedestrian experience in the city’s urban core.

The 11-story parking garage perched above the ground level provides much needed parking for the neighbouring Dallas County Courthouse.

Dallas County shares 1,219-space garage with real estate company Labora. The County is allocated 700 parking spaces, while Labora has 500, with another 19 have been allocated for retail.

Some 329 of the spaces are compact and a total of 28 bays for electric vehicles are currently installed, served by 14 dual charging points.

Corgan’s design accommodates for the provision of many different types of uses on top of the parking in the future, ensuring 700 Jackson Street can grow with the development and meet almost any future needs.

For example, the project’s structure and core are designed to accommodate a future ‘Phase 2’ development— either office, residential or hotel. This structural and programmatic flexibility positions the project to respond to evolving city and market needs in the future.

Design in Downtown Dallas

Project manager James Adams and project architect Carolyn Glenn walk us through the project
 
The 700 Jackson project is a shared development between two clients, Dallas County and Labora, meaning we had to understand how each different user would engage with the site. Dallas County intends to use its portion of the garage to provide parking to jurors and visitors to the George Allen Courts Building.

This project plays an important role in the experience of civic engagement, as it is the first stop for county visitors and jurors participating in their civic duty at the Courthouse. It sets the tone of a citizen’s impression and relationship with their city and what it means to be a central part of the democratic process.

In addition, Labora’s intended users consist of its employees who work typical office hours, but would also become patrons of the ground level retail. As an effort to enhance the walkability of downtown Dallas and enliven the surrounding area with retail storefronts and restaurant opportunities, we had to make sure patrons could navigate the site easily as well as enjoy their experience from a pedestrian standpoint.

Scale and details matter

As inhabitants of the central business district (CBD) ourselves, Corgan takes great responsibility for providing spaces downtown where people can thrive.

Starting with the selection of material products was crucial in developing our design schemes.

Working with material manufacturers during this process helped ensure our ideas were constructable and our material spans were realistic, giving our clients assurance in what we were proposing. In our studies, we discovered that by dividing the façade into “tiers”, the scale of the building became much more manageable and less imposing.

The tiers also provided us with an opportunity to create fractal-influenced patterns that move around the building, making the façade much more dynamic and beautiful to the human eye.

The movement that gets created as the pattern shifts around the rounded corners allows pedestrians to get a different perspective of the façade as they move around all four sides of this walkable development.

As we nailed down our concept design, we utilised our latest technologies to test different perforations within the façade panels. It allowed us to visualise how the building would be perceived at different scales: seen from inside buildings across the street, after you park your vehicle, and as a pedestrian. These tests helped inform our decision to choose a lesser percentage of perforations, as the higher percentage of material in the panel gave the building a stronger presence, disguising the view of vehicles inside the garage.

Downtown Dallas 360 Guiding Principles

The garage was designed with the following principles in mind

• Reinforce the relationship between the street and building edge
• Respect surroundings with context-sensitive designs
• Contribute to a positive, memorable urban experience
• Support a sustainable built environment.

Building on sound foundations

The columns and foundations were sized to be able to support an overhead structure and placed along the west perimeter in specific locations that would work with a development overhead as well. We designed an area between the current elevator/stair cores without post-tensioning in the slab, to allow for ease of slab demolition, then addition of new elevator banks if a building goes overhead.

We did allocate capacity within the Oncor vaults for a future development. The project has three Oncor vaults to be able to provide capacity for a project overhead and for the future addition of electric vehicle EV chargers.

Designing for pedestrians

With the white stone of the Dallas County Courthouse at the corner and the glossy blue curtain wall of the Omni down the street, our site is perfectly suited to embrace a contemporary design. We chose to clad our façade with crisp white perforated panels; a neutral color so that it can pair with any combination of materials overhead in Phase 2.

By using rigour in the geometry, we made sure the façade was not unnecessarily busy, random or complex so that a possible tower overhead could become the crowning jewel for downtown. We used the garage screen grid pattern, taken from the individual panel dimensions, to design the mullion patterning on the ground level retail. Retail storefront, with typical 5’ mullion spacing, can often feel cold and relentless, especially if it is not broken up along a 200’ block. The alternating horizontal mullions and vertical spacing help the ground level feel more intentionally designed, and more approachable from a pedestrian point of view.

Any building constructed in the CBD has an enormous responsibility to add value back to the urban environment and enhance the pedestrian experience. We took extra care in designing the ground floor of the building to align with guiding principles of the Downtown Dallas 360 plan below.

The garage driveways are intentionally kept separate from the lobby and stair egress outlets on the sidewalk, to ensure a safety separation of all patrons and visitors from vehicles. Retail storefronts are maximised around as much of the perimeter as possible, leaving only the loading dock and garage entries as the façade punctuation points.

The 700 Jackson Street team

The architect was Corgan while AG&E provided structural engineering and was the parking consultant. Other key constriction partners were Purdy McGuire (mechanical and engineering) and Westwood (civils and landscape).