16 Articles about Buildings and Architecture. Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison

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1 16 Articles about Buildings and Architecture Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison

2 16 Articles about Buildings and Architecture Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison Jensen Motor Boat Co. Prentis Hale, Drawings by Robert Hutchison 1995 Flower Kiosk Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison Articles about Buildings and Architecture Prentis Hale and Robert Hutchison Seattle, WA Copyright 2011 Ground Prentis Hale 1996 Rectifier Building Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 1997 Pacific Industrial Supply Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 1998 Seattle Felt Co. Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 1999 The authors would like to thank Foke Nyberg and Jennifer Dee for their encouragement, inspiration, and guidance. Additional thanks go out to the many students whose valuable and insightful contributions made possible all of the articles contained within this publication. Menu Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 2000 Garage & Store Building Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 2002 Nike Missile Base S-20 Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 2003 The Braeburn Prentis Hale 2004 Tsubota Industrial Supply Co. Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 2005 Apartment 307 Prentis Hale 2006 Interbay Roundhouse Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 2006 PARK HERE Prentis Hale & Robert Hutchison 2007 Timber Grain Elevators Robert Hutchison & Taiji Miyasaka 2009 Automated Parking Towers Robert Hutchison 2010

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36 Automated Parking Towers by Robert Hutchison The essence of the tower lies in its proportions: the slimmer it is, the more tower-like it will be. Alberto Kalach From the outside it looks like a single-car garage, but hidden inside is a 765-vehicle storage facility. The robotic automation ensures that the cars are parked as efficiently as possible. From The World s 18 Strangest Parking Garages, by Brian Resnick. Throughout the downtown areas of Japanese cities, automated parking towers intermingle with office towers. This urban vernacular building typology developed during the post-war economic growth that began in the 1960 s. Japan s rapid progress of motorization created the demand for large quantities of automobile parking to be located as close as possible to office buildings. The desire of property owners to obtain maximum return on their property with minimum investment of infrastructure, paralleled with increasing land costs, gave birth to the automated parking tower. Automated parking towers are houses for cars. They are briefly inhabited by humans only when the access of cars is necessary or desirable. Cars enter and leave the tower through a single door opening, which typically consists of a vertical lifting garage door. Turntables recessed in the paving in front of the door allow cars to be driven directly in and out of the building without the need for drivers to perform a three-point turn. After drivers have left their car at the ground floor level of the parking tower, an automated parking system hoists the car into a storage position in the tower above. There are two primary parking systems used inside parking towers. The carousel-type parking system consists of rotating automobile platforms hung from a chain, functioning in manner similar to a Ferris wheel. Maximum storage efficiency results since no circulation space is required throughout the tower, so this system is often used for sites with very small footprints. The elevator-type system consists of parking spaces stacked one above the other, and positioned on both sides of an elevator. While the elevator requires valuable circulation space throughout the tower, movement of cars can occur both vertically as well as horizontally, making it a more appropriate system for sites with larger footprints. Both systems eliminate the need for vehicle circulation, including on and off ramp infrastructure. Sapporo Parking Tower, Hokkaido Meguro-ku Parking Tower, Tokyo Kichijoji Parking Tower, Tokyo

37 Automated parking towers are primitive yet extreme buildings. The shape and dimensions of the parking tower are directly determined by site constraints, height limits, and automobile dimensions. Because of high land costs and the desire to provide as much parking as possible, the towers are extremely slim and tall, and utilize steel braced frame construction to allow for economic and rapid construction, with the capability to resist high seismic loads. With no need for views or natural light, the structures have no windows or openings other than the car access door. Since the automated parking system consists of a series of floating trays which move throughout the building, the tower has no floors. The buildings are not conditioned or insulated. Exterior cladding, either metal siding or cement panel siding, is attached to the outside of the steel structure to provide weather protection to the automobiles which are otherwise suspended in the air. Automated parking towers are easily identified. Their lack of fenestration and architectural detail contrasts with the glass office towers that stand beside them. A prominent letter P is typically painted on all four facades of the upper portion of the tower, serving as a navigation aid from afar for vehicles that have no GPS system. Yet despite their excess quantities, the towers are anonymous, they all look the same, none stand out more or less from the others. They are stationary landmarks in a moving field of cars, only their prime location and their pronouncement as a parking tower is what matters. In 2010, Robert Hutchison spent five months in Japan while on a creative artist fellowship. Much of his time was spent wandering the back streets of Japanese cities at night, during which he began to take a particular interest in the ubiquitous parking tower, which subsequently inspired numerous video documentations that were conducted in several cities throughout the country. Of specific interest was the point at street level where cars are pulled into the opening of the tower to be loaded on to the carousel. From the stationary gaze of the video camera installed across the street, the numerous personal and mechanical interactions that occur at this unique street level intersection become apparent over time. Parking attendants, customers, vending machines, vehicles, pedestrians, and bicyclists begin to appear like actors on a stage, with the parked car serving the role of protagonist. A sort of ongoing real-time play results. The stage alternates between the turntable in the foreground and the proscenium archway of the parking tower. While the videos provide an obvious commentary on urban Japanese lifestyles, customs, and conditions, they can also serve to illuminate the way our own city functions. Hutchison is currently assembling and editing the videos for a video projection installation as part of the upcoming Storefronts Seattle, a communitydriven effort which features original artworks by local artists displayed in vacant storefront spaces throughout Seattle s historic Pioneer Square and Chinatown- International District neighborhoods. The Storefronts Seattle venue provides a unique opportunity to transpose these videos into Seattle s own street level context. Viewed from across the street, the projections will interweave a typical Japanese cityscape with one in Seattle, highlighting the relationships between our own pedestrians, bicycles, and vehicles, and revealing our own peculiar mannerisms and ways of interacting. Automated Parking Tower Entries: Various Cities throughout Japan Meguro-ku Parking Tower, Tokyo Robert Hutchison is a Principal at Hutchison & Maul Architecture and Part-time Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at University of Washington. From May through October 2010, Hutchison lived in Japan as one of five 2010 JUSFC / NEA Japan-US Creative Artist Fellows. All photographs and film stills by the author. Storefront Seattle Proposal: Japan Street Scene superimposed into Seattle Street Scene

38 Prentis Hale is a graduate of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Washington and a principal of SHED S. Jackson Seattle WA Robert Hutchison is a graduate of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Washington and a principal of Hutchison & Maul Architecture Whitman Ave N Seattle WA

39 Prentis Hale and Robert Hutchison have written articles for the University of Washington Department of Architecture s Column 5 Journal since 1995 when they were graduate students. Their fi rst collaboration occurred when Prentis asked Rob if he would draft plans and elevations of the Jensen Motor Boat Co. building as part of an article that he was preparing for the Body & Building issue. Then, while both were in Scandinavia on a Valle Scholarship, they agreed to meet in Malmo Sweden with metric tape measures in hand to document Sigurd Lewerentz Flower Kiosk, resulting in their subsequent article with the same name. Ever since, they have continued to write about buildings which interest them, and issues which they believe are relevant to architecture.