A new 12-level aboveground parking garage in downtown Dallas can accommodate up to 15 more floors of potential future development.
By Jay Landers
Opened this past May, the 12-level, $66.8-million garage located at the corner of Jackson and Market streets in downtown Dallas offers more than just new parking. With its rounded corners and artfully arranged facade of perforated white metal, the striking aboveground facility complements the modern architectural style of its immediate neighbors while adding compelling visual interest of its own.
However, perhaps the most unique aspect of the new 1,219-space garage at 700 Jackson Street is essentially invisible to the casual observer. The reinforced concrete used in the construction of the garage was designed and prestressed to support the potential future addition of up to 15 more stories of hotel, residential, or possibly office space.
In short, the new facility is intended to help meet today’s parking needs in downtown Dallas while allowing for the possibility of significant future development located mere blocks away from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. The massive convention destination is itself slated to undergo a $3.7-billion expansion in the coming years.
‘Forward Thinking’
Developed by means of a public-private partnership, the 480,000 square foot garage is owned by the real estate investment and consulting firm Serra Real Estate Capital, which is leasing the facility to Dallas County. Financing for the project was provided by CGA Capital. At the end of the 10-year lease term, Dallas County will assume ownership of the structure, said R. David Kelly, Serra’s managing director and co-founder.
Inspired by the curved facade on the nearby Omni Hotel, the designers rounded the four corners of the garage to soften the building.
The garage is across the street from Dallas County’s George L. Allen, Sr., Courts Building, making it a convenient place for staff and visitors seeking parking. All told, the county has access to 700 spaces, while another 500 are reserved for the Labora Group, a philanthropic organization that owned the land on which the garage now stands and maintains an office nearby. The remaining 19 parking spaces are for the businesses that eventually will occupy a portion of the more than 18,000 square feet of street-level retail space available for lease.
The immediate needs and long-term vision of Dallas County were the driving forces behind the development of the new facility, Kelly said. The county “needed a parking structure that would serve their government complex,” he said. “They also wanted to be mindful of the future development vector for that part of downtown,” particularly the planned expansion of the convention center, Kelly noted. “This site and this approach were really designed to be the solution for a current problem today, while being mindful of how it would be complementary and accretive to what was to come.” In this way, the county proceeded on the project in a “forward-thinking” manner, he said.
At the same time, the Dallas County commissioners sought to maintain their alternatives, rather than committing financially to a major development project beyond that of the parking garage. “The overriding issue was flexibility, thoughtfulness, and pre-investment for the long term with optionality,” Kelly said. “The thought was, ‘what can we do that is conscious of budget but also aesthetically pleasing?’”
By designing and building the existing structure so that it can accommodate another 15 stories in the future, Dallas County “made a prudent investment that positioned this parking structure for the future and for future use as well,” Kelly said. The potential additional 15 stories “might be supplemental office space for the county if it needs it,” he said. “It might be a hotel if that’s the right use. It might be residential if that’s the right use.”
Concrete Choices
Certain key design choices were made to enable the existing facility to support the potential future development, said James Adams, a vice president for Corgan, the architecture and design firm that designed the Jackson Street parking garage. Corgan served as a member of the design-build team that was led by a joint venture comprising the construction contractors the Azteca-Omega Group and H.J. Russell & Company.
“The reinforced-concrete columns and foundations were sized to be able to support an overhead structure and placed along the west perimeter in specific locations that would work with a development overhead as well,” Adams said.
The reinforced-concrete floor slabs were post-tensioned to provide additional loading capacity. To account for the possibility that new elevators would need to be added as part of a future addition, a section of each floor located between the current elevator and stair cores was constructed of standard reinforced concrete but not post-tensioned. This was done “to allow for ease of slab demolition and then the addition of new elevator banks if a building goes overhead,” Adams said.
Although critical in nature, these forward-thinking design choices did not increase the project cost by much, Adams said. “It wasn’t a huge premium.”
Prewired for EVs
In another anticipatory design feature, every parking space is prewired for electric vehicle (EV) charging. Much like the decision to enable the facility to support a vertical addition, the choice to facilitate possible future EV charging throughout the entire garage made sense from a long-term perspective, Kelly said. “Not allowing for [future EV charging] is kind of being a Luddite and not anticipating what the future’s going to be.”
Currently, only the 7th Floor has operational EV chargers — 14 dual chargers from ChargePoint, Inc. Meanwhile, the east side of the roof is pre-designed to accommodate solar panels.
It will be up to Dallas County to decide whether to energize additional EV chargers, Kelly said. “We’re going to see what the queuing and wait time is. If we find that the charging stations are used 24 hours a day, or they’re used a hundred percent of the time during business hours, then we’re probably going to add more charging stations. But that’s going to be a decision that the county’s going to make based on the data they receive.”
Allowing for the possibility of energizing all the EV chargers, as well as any future addition to the facility itself, required significant planning and accommodations. Specifically, the design/build team opted to construct three large underground concrete vaults — two more than are currently necessary — to accommodate the transformers and other electrical equipment that would be needed to power every EV charger throughout the garage and supply electricity to the new development.
Although the upfront cost and added construction time were significant, adding the extra vaults now made sense, because it helped to “future-proof” the project, Adams said. “It gave [the project owners] a lot of leeway to come in and do something later, which we think was a very, very forward-thinking, smart idea.”
Finding the Right Facade
Despite its stylized, artistic exterior, the Jackson Street facility was not designed to look like something other than a parking garage, Adams said. “For us as a design team, we wanted a building that’s honest. We always try to make honest architecture, but we also wanted a building that shielded, metaphorically and literally, cars from neighboring buildings. We didn’t want bright headlights shining into buildings. We didn’t want it to feel like it was a big, massive garage in the middle of a downtown urban fabric.”
To this end, the design team sought to ensure that the new garage would blend in well with the neighboring buildings, many of which have exteriors featuring white marble or white metal panels. “We leaned into that, and we thought we wanted to do a metal panel facade,” Adams said. Perforated white metal panels were favored for their contemporary, yet timeless, appearance. The neutral color of the panels also can be paired with any combination of materials that might be used in a future phase of the project.
Subsequent analyses were conducted to select the appropriate level of perforation and develop a method for connecting the facade directly to the concrete frame structure of the garage.
“We were able to get a very cost-effective facade that is uniform across the structure and its materiality,” Adams said. To ensure that the exterior was not “too monolithic,” the design team “introduced the removal of some of the vertical elements in a non-linear pattern that created a little bit of texture and visual interest to the building,” he said.
Inspired by the curved facade on the nearby Omni Hotel, the designers rounded the four corners of the garage “to soften the building,” Adams said. “There were a lot of concerns that we were introducing a massive heavy structure that would be an impediment to people just trying to walk by the building.”
The resulting structure is “as beautiful but as honest as possible,” Adams said. Although the facade helps to screen the exterior ramps from direct view, “there’s no denying it’s a garage,” he noted.
One Garage, or Two?
Design work began in spring 2020 and the project broke ground in November 2021. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on May 1, 2024.
Located mere blocks from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, the new facility is poised to take advantage of anticipated future growth nearby.
Although currently operated as a single parking structure, the Jackson Street facility can be managed as two separate garages. “It is designed so that you can have shared ownership of the garage,” Kelly explained. This arrangement reflects the fact that the project originally was going to separate the areas dedicated to parking for Dallas County and Labora.
For this reason, the garage features two vehicular entrances — one on the north side and the other on the south — and a double-helix design that can be modified to create two separate garages, one having roughly 700 spaces and the other approximately 500.
“Our belief is it’s more efficient to run [the facility] as a single entity,” Kelly said, “but it can be run as two separate entities. The problem with the double-helix design is, unfortunately, it’s impossible not to create a couple of dead ends, where people would have to back up and turn around when they get to the end of a transit lane.”
“That happens in a few places,” Kelly said. “That’s the downside of the double helix configuration. The upside is that you can run it as two separate garages.”
Equipped with recessed gates, the garage’s two vehicular entrances were intentionally kept separate from the lobby and stair egress outlets on the sidewalk to help ensure safety. The garage includes six passenger elevators, one service elevator, and infrastructure to accommodate two more elevators.
Of the two entrances, one is painted bright blue and the other orange. Meant to be eye-catching, the colorful entrances are designed to help guide visitors who are unfamiliar with the layout of the garage. “Our in-house branding and signage wayfinding team did a fantastic job to create some very simple, clean, large graphics throughout the garage to improve wayfinding throughout,” Adams said.
“We used these simple colors and simple palette and simple form,” Adams said. “We wanted to go big and bold with the signage.” At the same time, paint is easy to redo or change as necessary. “You just paint another color,” he said. “You’re not paying for a bunch of expensive signage and special fonts.”
“This essential project embodies the Commissioners Court’s commitment to downtown development and improves the experience for jurors, constituents, and employees,” said Elba Garcia, a Dallas County Commissioner, in a May 1 statement from Serra.
Project Credits
Owner and developer: Serra Real Estate Capital
Design-build team: joint venture comprising Azteca-Omega Group and H.J. Russell & Company
Architect: Corgan
Structural engineer and parking consultant: AG&E
Civil engineer and landscape architect: Westwood Professional Services
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing consultant: Purdy-McGuire
Operator: ABM Industries, Inc.
Jay Landers is editor-in-chief of Parking Today. He can be reached at jay@parkingtoday.com.
