S2: Scott Francisco & Jessica Robinson, Green Garages #51

Scott Francisco & Jessica Robinson discuss Pilot Project’s Green Garage Hub – Bonfires on the Move  In this episode, Jessica and Scott Francisco, Director of Pilot Projects, discover a mutual fascination with the unloved city parking garage and explore what a current design for today’s urban neighborhood might look like. Pilot Projects’ Green Hub concept is an adaptive reuse that reimagines parking structures as vibrant community spaces with parking for bicycles, coworking space, a cafe, and even a rooftop garden with solar panels. Scott and the team partnered closely with a number of community organizations in New York to put this design together, and we hope that a network of parking garages like the Green Hub will eventually be built.                Full Transcription: Jessica: Scott, it is so good to talk to you this morning. I have to confess that we are about to dig into one of my favorite topics but it’s an obscure one for sure, and that’s parking garages. Welcome, and thank you for joining. Scott: Thanks for having me. Jessica: Yeah. Scott, you’re the Director of Pilot Projects out there in New York. I was looking at the website, and I see you guys describe the work that you do focus on people, spaces, culture and infrastructure and certainly parking garages are one of those pieces of cities that we don’t often think a lot about and don’t appreciate. Thank you again for joining me on this journey today. I’ll give a little context here; the reason I love parking garages so much is I spent a ton of time in them when I was managing parking for Zipcar out in San Francisco and had a chance to see lots of different designs and think about the neighborhoods that they were located in. When I heard about the Green Hub project that you guys are working on I just had to hear more. Tell me first a little bit more about Pilot Projects and how Green Hub came to be and what exactly are you thinking about for parking garages today and in the future. Scott: Jessica, we have something in common that’s our love of parking grudges because I also have a bit of history with them. When I was a very young architecture student, I spent a summer doing assessments of parking garages for an engineering firm where we dragged chains around on the surfaces to test whether the concrete was still intact. I spent a whole summer in parking garages in Canada. Pilot Projects is a...