A parking garage that wows. In, of all things, a new Idaho Wheat Commission building
Plans for a new downtown Boise headquarters for the Idaho Wheat Commission include a space-age marvel that could have come straight from the 1960s cartoon “The Jetsons.”
The commission plans to level its drab single-story building at 821 W. State St., built in 1945, and replace it with a sleek three-story building with an automated car-stacking system.
The system would allow the commission to squeeze 34 vehicles into the same space that 12 cars would occupy in a traditional garage. Drivers would drive their vehicles into metal compartments that provide protection from other vehicles. A mechanism would move a car to an available storage slot. When you want to retrieve your car, the mechanism would retrieve it.
“Most people think this is just the kind of stuff found in movies,” said Scott Brafford, a member of the design development team for Harding Steel, a Denver company that is providing the parking system for the building. “But they are really very common.”
Just not in Boise. Yet.
The car-stacking systems can be found in Portland, Seattle and Salt Lake City, said Brafford, who works in Portland.
“Within an hour, you can see six or seven buildings in Portland that have these things in there,” he said by phone. “What we do enables better architecture, because you’re able to compress parking.”
Brafford declined to say how much the system, from German manufacturer Wöhr Autoparksysteme GmbH, costs.
“But it’s almost always cheaper than the alternative, a multilevel garage,” he said.
The system will take up room on three floors, one below ground. On the first floor, there will also be nine regular parking spaces.
The building would have 27,336 square feet, more than four times the 6,000 square feet of the current building.
Other state agricultural commissions — including the barley, bean and wine commissions, the Idaho Grain Producers Association and the Milk Producers of Idaho — would also have offices on the second floor in the new building. Those groups occupy space in the current building.
The ground floor would have retail space along with the main entrance lobby and parking. The third floor will have an office and an outdoor roof deck.
The application does not say how much the building will cost. Blaine Jacobson, executive director of the Wheat Commission, did not return calls seeking comment.
The Boise City Design Review Committee will hold a hearing on the application at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 11, at City Hall, 150 N. Capitol Blvd.
