(The following drawings and photographs represent the first of three phases of buildings. It comprises the single largest tenant space, for the client, a parking garage, and the central plant. The following text describes the completed site plan, as the three phases were planned and permitted together.)
The site for this one hundred thousand square foot building is a five acre parcel in a part of Vero Beach that promises, as the value of the land increases, to transition from suburban patterns of relatively less intense use, to more urban patterns. The design of this building coincides with the city’s recent effort to decide what form this transition might take, and whether it should be managed and embraced as an inevitable consequence of rapid growth, or resisted to the extent possible through land development restrictions.
The apparent bias of existing guidelines is for suburban patterns that strictly limit heights and FAR, and encourage green open spaces. In the extreme, of course, growth, low density and open space are irreconcilable. At the least, the wish to have all these things forces metastasizing growth at the edge of the city that consumes open land far from existing infrastructure. The intention of this design is to propose a model to intensify the development of this whole part of town, consistent both with the rising value of land and with the city’s rightful emphasis on the maintenance of green spaces.
There is an onerous thirty five foot height limit on the parcel that all but guarantees suburban FARs. Ironically, there is at the same time, an aversion to street parking and parking garages. This guarantees that open green space will always trend toward the twenty five percent minimum because of the pressures of surface parking. These considerations make it difficult to find a decent model for new development.
The site is bounded on the east by a major artery, across which there are distant views of the Indian River. Another major two lane road is off the northwest corner of the property, a winding green artery that connected the oldest part of the mainland city with the barrier island. On the north boundary is an atrophied city street right of way, the street itself never fully realized. To the south is an office building that graphically represents the surface parking office model that our design seeks an alternative to.
Anyone faced with the development of new office space in Vero Beach has to thread the needle between the scale economies of new construction and the ready availability of humanely scaled but aging office space built when land was much less expensive. The client and principal tenant, a national civil engineering firm, wanted to do a project that represented their strengths and expertise. They decided early on to build smaller buildings more consistent with existing office buildings nearby.
They also resolved to build a parking garage, in large measure so they could keep the site as open as the height limit and maximum FAR could provide for. Vero Beach takes what is at best an ambivalent position toward parking garages. It associates them with a density beyond what they see as consistent with a small town. But rather than hide them with liner buildings, they almost guarantee garages of maximum adverse impact by stipulating that they have to be more or less open structures. As such, parking garages can look like little other than what they are. We proposed lining a mid-block garage on the two sides facing the principal adjacent streets. The client proposed actually building the street in the undeveloped right of way that ran across the northern edge of the property, and proposed further parking along the street that would serve this and other blocks.
Our contribution to the project was probably an insistence that the interior of the property be developed with the same intensity and care that would, as a matter of course, be brought to the water side of the property. Buildings and courtyards were interspersed so that every office would have a garden to look onto. And the gardens were connected so that everyone’s trip from their car to their office was through a series of connected gardens. Streets were created or restored so that a semblance of city blocks might emerge from a private parcel the size of two city blocks. The property was divided roughly in half by a road connecting to the property to the south and 24 th street to the north- never a real street, connected the two adjacent boulevards.
Speculative offices were only shelled out, but we developed a third of the space for the client. This space was part of the liner hiding the garage from the historic green boulevard, and it had parking beneath it as part of the strategy to leave the site as green as possible, so it had a deep 120 foot plate. The difficulties of planning their space derived largely from these provisions for parking. We provided some open space down the middle of two cross axes, and did everything possible to lace interior and exterior spaces together. We used the parking plinth as a pretext to create a monumental stair as an entrance to the building. The offices all have either long perimeter views or interior views to terraces or the atrium. The central hall was exposed as much as possible to sources of natural light from the perimeter.