A parking garage is America’s coolest building?
Well, it’s not just any parking garage. Not when it’s in architecturally trendy Miami Beach.
The Lincoln Road parking garage, as well as Miami Beach’s Raleigh Hotel, made Thrillist’s new list of America’s coolest buildings that you don’t know.
First on the list was the Lincoln Road garage, which anchors one end of Miami Beach’s famous Lincoln Road mall.
“Unequivocally, it’s one of the best-looking parking garages ever constructed,” Thrillist wrote. “It’s just as badass inside as it is outside, offering up airy city views, and it doubles as a party and event space.”
The Post’s Barbara Marshall wrote about it in 2011:
“All muscle, no cloth” is the way architect Jacques Herzog of the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron describes his wall-less “carchitecture.” The top floor event space rents for $12,000 to $15,000 with developer Robert Wennet’s penthouse sitting above that. The building also contains the hyper-trendy Alchemist boutique tucked into a glass cube whose walls glow in late-day light. Not surprisingly, the building has become a magnet for photographers.
“Every afternoon, people are aiming their big lenses through the glass,” said a sales clerk.
The Raleigh also made the list because, as Thrillist wrote, “There’s something about art deco and Miami that just feel right together. The glamour, the luxury, the feeling that you’re just on the right side of tacky without getting too kitschy.”
Those were the only Florida buildings on the list.
But we’re fond of some of our structures, present and planned, in Palm Beach County.
Does Miami have a building nicknamed for a Star Wars villain? We’ve got the Darth Vader building in downtown West Palm Beach.
And some planned structures have the potential to ramp up PBC’s cool factor, including Jeff Greene’s boxy office building One West Palm and the new multi-million dollar expansion of the Norton Museum of Art.
Finally, while it’s not a commercial building, how many communities have a faux castle like this labor of love in Wellington?