LA LOGI-C: Turning a Parking Garage into a Multi-Speed Hub for Goods, Drones and People

Most parking garages are built on one simple equation: a car arrives, climbs a ramp, occupies a bay and leaves. LA LOGI-C breaks that equation by asking what happens when the garage stops being organized around the car. The answer is not a cleaner parking structure but a different building altogether, an urban machine where bicycles, drones, delivery services, e-commerce parcels, second-hand goods, furniture, personal objects and people all circulate through the same concrete framework. Cars remain, but they become one participant in a much larger transportation ecology.

Designed by sirui chen and recognized as an Editor's Choice entry in the Parkx competition, the proposal takes the 636 Maple Ave Garage as its testing ground. Rather than inserting a new program into an old shell, the project rethinks the logic that organized the structure in the first place. Ramps, elongated floor plates and repetitive structural bays are kept and reread as infrastructure for logistics, retail, workshops, exhibitions, learning and public life.

Reading the Garage as a Node in the City's Exchange Network

The opening sheet sets the terms of the argument. An aerial site map places the 636 Maple Ave Garage inside a dense network of streets, buildings and activity, presenting it as a potential exchange point within the city rather than an isolated object. Beside it, axonometric drawings peel the structure into layers, with color-coded program and enclosure showing how the existing parking frame can hold several uses at once.

What makes this strategy convincing is restraint. The designer does not erase the garage's layered organization; the vertical dimension, the long floor plates and the repetitive structure all become assets. The axonometrics show new volumes and access paths threaded into that frame, so the transformation reads as a dialogue between an established infrastructural type and a fresh set of urban uses.

Ramps That Cut Through a Stack of Programs

The level-by-level plans and sections, from ground to roof, are where the project's central idea becomes legible. Colored program zones occupy the old bays, while the ramps keep slicing diagonally through every floor. Instead of one universal circulation system, the project separates movement into distinct routes for public users, cars, shopping drop-offs, drive-through collection and drones. Each route meets specific programmatic zones, so the building is organized less by floors than by flows.

The uncolored section adds the human scale the diagrams lack. Floors stack up with double-height voids opening between them, and small figures use furnished rooms on every level. The drawing shows that the garage's tight, repetitive section can loosen into rooms for meeting, learning and working, with the voids creating visual links between them that a conventional parking deck never offers.

Lecture Rooms and Storage Ramps Under One Structure

The two interior renderings show the project's range. In the lecture room, a spiral stair rises beside tall glazing, orange armchairs and a potted plant soften the space, and two figures pass along the corridor. It is a quiet, almost domestic scene, and it proves that learning and social programs can live comfortably inside infrastructure first drawn for vehicles.

The storage drop-off view sits at the other end of the spectrum. A long gray ramp runs beside a rhythm of vertical fins as a woman and a small group walk up the incline. The ramp, once the garage's purely mechanical element, becomes a public promenade tied to the movement of goods. Putting these two images side by side makes the argument clearly: the same structure handles both logistics and gathering without either one taking over.

A Metallic Skin That Announces a New Public Role

From the street, the transformed garage reads as a single metallic-clad volume, with orange accents and stepped balconies breaking up its mass under a pale dusk sky. The orange carries over from the interior furnishings, giving the building a consistent identity inside and out. The balconies hint at the life within, turning a typology usually defined by blank parking decks into a facade that faces the city.

Why This Project Matters

Cities are full of parking structures whose future is uncertain as mobility changes. LA LOGI-C does not try to save the garage by improving parking. It treats the structure as a resource and the issue as one of circulation. By separating flows for people, cars, deliveries and drones, and attaching each to its own programs, the project offers a repeatable method for reusing these buildings, not a one-off image.

Its strongest move is to keep the ramp. Many adaptive reuse proposals treat ramps as obstacles to demolish, but here the ramp becomes the spine of the new building, carrying goods, visitors and activity through a stack of overlapping uses. That reading changes the garage from a place where things stop into a place where objects, services, knowledge and experiences keep moving.

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Project credits: LA LOGI-C Parkx (uni.xyz).