University of Texas at Austin East Campus Parking Garage

Designed with a 2,000-car capacity and approximately 756,000 square feet, the East Campus Parking Garage is dissected into two phases of approximately 1,000 cars each.

The first section of the poured-in-place post tensioned concrete garage is on the south portion of the lot which allows access to the remaining surface parking. Upon completion and occupancy of the first section of the garage, the construction of the second section began. The first section of garage was fully operational and functional during the construction of the second phase to maintain adequate parking for staff and students. The garage includes 7,000 square feet of flexible of support space and is designed to allow for the future addition of a bus transit facility and an additional 28,000 square feet office space.

The biggest driver in the design of the Garage was the impact of a Capital View Corridor crossing the middle of the site. A Capital View Corridor is a plane floating in space that replicates the view path of a location in the City back to the top of the Capital Dome. In this case, the applicable view corridor is the one connecting the old Mueller Airport Control Tower to the Capital. The view corridor plane established a lid on the center of the site in which no building element can invade, proving challenging to create a garage footprint able to provide 2,000 cars. The solution had four main elements: recess the Garage ½ a level into the Grade (which maintains the Garage as an open garage); with the site sloping from north to south, take advantage of the south’s low side to provide an additional level; use 10’-2” floor-to-floor heights to maximize number of levels; and outside the footprint of the view corridor on the south edge, create a bonus upper level. The result is a core five-level garage fitting 12” under the view corridor (at tightest condition) with a section of seven levels on south section of Garage.