BREAKING LOTS Transforming parking lots on public spaces and sustainable systems.


3rd year studio- 2018
Landscape Architecture Department
College of Enviromental Design
Cal Poly Pomona, CA




This studio will explore the numerous typologies of the ubiquitous parking lot and parking
structure as a multivalent landscape structures. The ‘lot’ and ‘garage’ are as much as 1/3 of all
developed land coverage in some communities and in our current culture, a necessary part of
daily life. As technology advances, density intensifies and the economic, ecological and cultural
value of ‘land’ increases, these pervasive landscapes will begin to change. This studio will
explore the potential of the individual types of lots and the collective potential of a linked network
of these underutilized and singularly performing ‘open spaces’. The studio will investigate
parking structures as multifunctional landscapes that store cars but also serve numerous more
infrastructural and potentially ecological function; cultural performance spaces, stormwater
sinks, climbing canyons, urban bat and bee colonies, etc. Students will work individually and in
teams to test a number of different sites as the studio proposes a linked system from old
infrastructure thusly creating new green urban areas.