Beautiful Parking Garages

Can a parking garage be beautiful? Yeah, why not? But usually they are hideously ugly. Why? They are designed to be merely functional. Some architect busted her ass designing a building--and the developer paid a lot of money for it. And when she was done, the developer said to some engineer, oh yeah, put a 400 car parking garage next to this masterpiece I just commissioned.

Anyway, The Fountains at Memorial City is no masterpiece. They are condos under construction east of Memorial City Mall. They are being built right next to the recently completed Cemex headquarters. I drive by them on the freeway every morning, but this morning I saw this:



Here's a composite photo of the mural on the side of the garage. And you can see a larger version here.



This mural on the side of the garage is nothing especially clever or innovative, but it looks nice and it's a lot more than most builders do for their parking garages. And it works well with the real trees in front of it.