Herzog & de Meuron’s Car park in Miami’s Lincoln Road

The skyline about 1111 Lincoln Road, designed by Herzog and de Meuron incorporates 300 parking spaces.

It’s not a building, it’s more like a performance piece,” says the property developer in his corner office, the palm-strewn townscape of Miami Beach visible behind his elbow as it heads towards the ocean. Given that he’s talking about a multistorey car park, this might seem pretentious, but bear with him. He’s trying to make a parking garage go where none has gone before.

The new building at 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami, sets out not only to be more beautiful than other car parks but also to “solve a very important urban problem”. Rather than being just a transport facility, it is, according to its developer Robert Wennett, “an urbanistic, friendly, connected building … a public place for anyone who wants to enjoy the city”. It includes “a cultural plane where people can produce culture” and it “mixes programme in unique ways that people have not seen before”.

It is a labour of love. “This was about a moment in time in my life,” says Wennett. “For 20 years, I did things that were all about being commercial. Now I wanted to do something about legacy. About what I would leave.”

The car park will, to quote the official blurb, “further Miami’s international prominence as a 21st-century destination for art, commerce and culture”.

There is also a restaurant on the roof of the old bank and, straight above the parking, an ample pad with pool and patio, the future home of Wennett himself. Off to one side is a little development of courtyarded houses built on top of a new bank. On another side, the adjoining stretch of Lincoln Road has been reshaped by the landscape architect Raymond Jungles.

Jungles is a follower of the great Brazilian Roberto Burle Marx, who made the promenade at Copacabana. As on the Rio beach the pavements at Lincoln Road are animated by strong patterns of light and dark paving and abundant sub-tropical growth. There is also one of Dan Graham’s reflecting/transparent glass pavilions.

The purpose of all this activity is to make the garage into an extended urban space. If the joy of streets is that they do several things at once, that they are thoroughfares, gathering places, extensions of the home or whatever, the vice of modern traffic engineering is that it separates this multiplicity into its component parts.

A road is for transport and nothing else. A shopping precinct is for shopping. A car park is for parking cars. It’s like making a souffle back into eggs, butter and flour. 1111 Lincoln Road tries to cook them together again.

Herzog & de Meuron’s architecture is what brings all these elements together. It is austerely playful, or deadpan theatrical, a bare concrete frame at first sight not unlike many other car parks you have seen.