PARK PARK

PARK PARK
Calgary, Alberta

2022 National Urban Design Award of Excellence, RAIC/CIP/CSLA

2021 Best Design/Implementation of a Surface Parking Lot, International Parking and Mobility Institute

2020 Innovation in Parking Operations and Programs Award, Canadian Parking Association

PARK PARK is a room of parked curiosities designed to provoke a non-prescriptive rethink of the ubiquitous neighbourhood parking lot and the way we designate land use in our cities. We are all too familiar with the barren landscape formed by surface parking lots; they exist all across North America. In contrast, PARK PARK is designed as a layer cake of uses where single use has long prevailed. This ‘parking lot park’ provides a colourful, vibrant collision of activities that takes on new meaning and provokes new conversations about the role of parking lots in urban neighbourhoods like Inglewood in Calgary.

The park is lined with a tall building-scaled scaffolding that frames objects constructed as symbolic iconographs of park use scattered throughout the lot. The life-size signs create a kind of Wonderland designed to shake visitors free of everything they know about parking lots and the generic use-specific appointment of urban land. Not subtle, not austere, not ordered, PARK PARK is one-part play, another part provocation about the prescriptive authority of designated land planning borne out of the less is more or form follows function thinking applied to urban planning over the last century. At PARK PARK, more is more and form follows pleasure.

At PARK PARK, you look through a life-size symbol of a tree to see a child playing hockey against a coloured garage door. Peer through a campfire (complete with a motion activated hand warmer!) and you will find a car. Glance across the picnic table and there’s a bicycle flickering in a forest of steel trees.  PARK PARK is a place of curiosities made from parks. This is a parking park, a sitting park, a playing park, a gathering park, a riding park, a park kind of a park. PARK PARK challenges the way we think about the ubiquitous nature of single use territories in our cities and layers that with activity upon activity.