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Spoke Apartment Complex Parking Garage
Cladding on a Chicago parking garage hides the unattractive concrete structure underneath and provides ample ventilation - while standing out in the process.
One of the biggest challenges of parking garage design is finding the balance between properly ventilating airborne contaminants while meeting a desired architectural look. When designing the Spoke Apartment Complex Parking Garage in Chicago, Fitzgerald Associates Architects faced this challenge head on.
Located in the City's vibrant River West neighborhood, the 300-spot garage spans two buildings, supporting a 12-story residential tower and two-story retail development. Architects wanted to mask the garage's unsightly concrete so it could blend in with the attached residential tower covered in glass and brick, while appealing to visitors and passerby.
Finding an affordable and attractive solution for this project wasn't easy. Coupled with the need for a system that was sturdy enough to maintain connections with the concrete throughout Chicago's brutal winters while properly ventilating the garage made it even more of a challenge to find the right system.
The unique configuration of the panels allows air to move into and around the garage while exhausting CO2.
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The architects originally created a monolithic look with the panels, but the City of Chicago wanted to break the screen up. This resulted in a pattern of four 16mm-thick panels traveling vertically across the garage while creating "horizontal ribbons" of different depths that completely hide the concrete walls.
"There's an interweaving of three different brick colors going up both buildings, starting with a darker brick to medium brick and a lighter brick. They're bandings of interwoven masonry," said architect Peter Szczelina, Fitzgerald Associates Architects, Chicago. "Ultimately, the horizontal bands of the panels kept in character with the horizontal banding of the masonry in both towers."
The cladding installed on the parking garage facilitates the movement of daylight and natural air in and out of the garage and helped put the mixed-use development on track to earn LEED Silver certification. Specified in green matte glazing to match the exterior of the residential tower, the bands of PentaClad™ are mechanically interlocked, enabling the system to withstand extremely high loads without concern for the panels disengaging, providing durability and long-term performance.
The [PentaClad] panels were a cost-effective approach to screening a parking garage, which is often required by the City of Chicago and other municipalities.
It gave a unique design element other than what you typically see for a garage... and allowed us to use a color that worked well and complimented the materials and color palette of the project.
- Peter Szczelina, Architect, Fitzgerald Associates Architects
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