A clandestine escape
‘The Garage’ is a sensorial, clandestine escape for the car enthusiast, away from the monotony of Auckland’s CBD, a vivified nook backing onto Fort Lane and accessible from Commerce Street.
The car park building now houses a multi-level go-karting track, vending machine diner and car parking space designed to showcase your ride; inspired by Tokyo and its fast-paced, underground car scene, epitomised by the film ‘The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift’. The space is designed to enliven the Fort Lane precinct using vibrant lighting and colour, reverberating acoustics and contrasting materiality.
With the underlying concepts of a biased shared space, increased traffic and the parking lot’s redundancy; a building that would once have fallen into slumber each evening at five is now perpetually alive.
I have designed a multi-sensory refuge for a dying breed, the petrol head, being forced into extinction by a changing climate.
This project briefed me to design a space into the Fort Lane precinct in downtown Auckland that explored the ‘Cinematic’. I came to the idea of a ‘Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift’ (my ‘cinematic’) inspired design that looked to enliven the precinct and the supposedly redundant parking garage. The design also emphasised the vehicular bias of Fort Lane/ Street, what is meant to be a shared space. I came to these design concepts through my love for everything automotive, my belief the Auckland CBD needs more ‘life’ and the expression by a lecturer that the car park building was now technically redundant. The design was inlaid into the entire 10 level parking building and included a showcase parking area for customers vehicles, a 4-level drift-go-karting track and a lounge (hang-out) space with Japanese inspired vending machine diner, and racing simulator set-up. This was inspired by the atmosphere and underground car scene epitomised in ‘Tokyo Drift’. The design process was largely digital as that is my preferred workflow from photography to digital modelling to rendering, however I also dabbled more into physical experimentation in this project with material/surface testing. This is a start at creating a more enlivened, fun cityscape.
