1111 Lincoln Road Makes Parking an Architectural Event

1111 Lincoln Road has opened for business, giving Miami Beach a conspicuous new parking and retail structure by Herzog & de Meuron. Its exposed concrete form makes an everyday building type unusually visible, asking passersby to look at a garage as part of the city’s public architecture.

The project combines parking with street-level commercial space. That mixture is important because a garage’s relationship to a neighborhood is not determined only by the number of cars it can hold. What happens at the sidewalk, and how the building meets people arriving on foot, can affect the experience of the surrounding streets.

At the western end of Lincoln Road, the new structure introduces another reason to pay attention to the district’s built environment. It is not a museum or concert hall, yet it invites the kind of discussion often reserved for cultural buildings. The opening makes a practical urban function into a visible design proposition, with daily use now testing the architecture’s ambitions.