The Architecture of Parking Areas: a Challenge for Landscape Design. Garden-Infrastructure in Periurban Areas

This paper presents a critical review of significant parking projects selected within a contemporary international pool and aims to discuss the role of parking design as an opportunity to rethink suburban and rural landscapes. This goal deals with the broader themes of the relationships between infrastructure and landscape and holistic landscape design. Parking design opportunities are frequent and may be related to the construction of intermodal stations, airports, shopping malls, industrial areas, as well as natural, cultural and leisure parks. These common spaces require an appropriate, original and thoughtful design. Parking areas can be designed to go beyond their specific original function and create gardens and public spaces lying between the city an the countryside, thus producing new hybrid landscapes blending architecture, infrastructure and nature. Also referring to the well-known Land Art phenomenon, whose aesthetical and ethical values are assumed by landscape architecture and combined with social and economic needs, this paper focuses on a selection of contemporary parking design projects where dialectics exist between human activities and nature, agriculture and nature, and landscapes and gardens.