I looked at parking garages and how they interacted with the public realm within the Valentine neighborhood and Midtown. There were many examples of very bad or ugly forms and few examples of what I would consider good form. Let’s define my criteria, first if a parking garage is a stand-alone structure (meaning it doesn’t fill the same space as the structure it services) it is automatically bad form in my book. This is really the only criteria because the land use is the first most important piece in urban planning and city design. A stand-alone parking garage means that space is only ever used for parking, when it could be used for housing, commercial, and anything else. As long as we rely primarily on cars as our mode of transportation we are going to need garages, but they should interact with the public realm positively, or more likely, as little as possible. I think the Congress Lofts built in parking garage plays this role nicely as it has minimal public realm interaction and is integrated into the same structure its servicing.