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1111 Lincoln Road, Miami, Florida; Leighton House, London

A multistorey garage is usually little more than a soulless concrete stack, but as designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects of Tate Modern, a new one is bringing high style to Miami Beach
1111 Lincoln Rd
‘Austerely playful’: Herzog & de Meuron's car park in Miami's Lincoln Road. Photograph by Iwan Baan
Rowan Moore
Sat 27 Mar 2010 20.05 EDT

"It's not a building, it's more like a performance piece," says the property developer in his corner office, the palm-strewn townscape of Miami Beach visible behind his elbow as it heads towards the ocean. Given that he's talking about a multistorey car park, this might seem pretentious, but bear with him. He's trying to make a parking garage go where none has gone before.

Car parks are the unacknowledged drudges of cities and some of the strangest moments come when they encounter the shopping mall, cultural centre or luxury apartment tower they are built to serve.

Abruptly, concrete can become marble and in the space of a few centimetres a cavalcade of planting, fabrics and furnishings can begin. Functional space becomes the ceremonial world of theming, or fantasy or high-end cultural architecture as suddenly as if a CD were switched on mid-symphony.

Somehow, we're supposed not to notice. Car parks are like the clunky battery packs or chargers that come with sleek laptops and phones: we are meant to behave as if they're not really there. You don't need an architecture critic to tell you that they are usually ugly. And if sometimes you can find examples that are more elegantly or sensitively styled than most, they remain blunt pieces of infrastructure.

The new building at 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami, sets out not only to be more beautiful than other car parks but also to "solve a very important urban problem". Rather than being just a transport facility, it is, according to its developer Robert Wennett, "an urbanistic, friendly, connected building … a public place for anyone who wants to enjoy the city". It includes "a cultural plane where people can produce culture" and it "mixes programme in unique ways that people have not seen before".

It is a labour of love. "This was about a moment in time in my life," says Wennett. "For 20 years, I did things that were all about being commercial. Now I wanted to do something about legacy. About what I would leave."

The car park will, to quote the official blurb, "further Miami's international prominence as a 21st-century destination for art, commerce and culture".

Wennett interviewed some architects, younger and older, famous and less so, and chose Herzog & de Meuron, the Basel-based firm which combines celebrity, artistic credibility and a certain likability in its work. A distinguishing characteristic is its lack of a house style. Its projects run from Tate Modern, where its own signature was subordinated to bringing out the latent qualities of the former Bankside Power Station, to the Beijing Olympic Stadium, the exuberant steel bird's nest that is now famous all over the world. It can do quiet and it can do noisy.

Miami's Lincoln Road is one of the few places in a car-dominated city where people walk for pleasure, a cousin of Barcelona's Ramblas plugged into a network of multi-lane highways. The car park is at the point where these two worlds meet and it functions as a harbour or portal, a place where people switch from one mode to another. It also shares its site with a 1960s former bank building, handsome if fortress-like, and is joined to it.

The development, car park and old bank together, takes on some of the qualities of Lincoln Road, with a ring of "curated retail" around its base, including the glossy sex-and-style bookshop Taschen, and high-class lingerie and sportswear shops. One shop is placed in a glass box high and alone, five levels up. Called Alchemist, it will sell the elegant-decadent clothes and jewellery of Rick Owens, Chrome Hearts and Martin Margiela. Shops even one storey above ground level are usually regarded as commercial suicide, says Wennett: "People thought we were insane."

There is also a restaurant on the roof of the old bank and, straight above the parking, an ample pad with pool and patio, the future home of Wennett himself. Off to one side is a little development of courtyarded houses built on top of a new bank. On another side, the adjoining stretch of Lincoln Road has been reshaped by the landscape architect Raymond Jungles.

Jungles is a follower of the great Brazilian Roberto Burle Marx, who made the promenade at Copacabana. As on the Rio beach the pavements at Lincoln Road are animated by strong patterns of light and dark paving and abundant sub-tropical growth. There is also one of Dan Graham's reflecting/transparent glass pavilions.

The purpose of all this activity is to make the garage into an extended urban space. If the joy of streets is that they do several things at once, that they are thoroughfares, gathering places, extensions of the home or whatever, the vice of modern traffic engineering is that it separates this multiplicity into its component parts.

A road is for transport and nothing else. A shopping precinct is for shopping. A car park is for parking cars. It's like making a souffle back into eggs, butter and flour. 1111 Lincoln Road tries to cook them together again.

Herzog & de Meuron's architecture is what brings all these elements together. It is austerely playful, or deadpan theatrical, a bare concrete frame at first sight not unlike many other car parks you have seen. It is the opposite of Miami's ubiquitous art deco or, indeed American architecture in general, which is generally a matter of putting a (hopefully) nice wrapping on to a frame.

If Miami is a place of slap and hair dye and shiny accessories, 1111 Lincoln Road is, as Jacques Herzog puts it, "all muscle". If Miami is a flamingo city, this tends more in the pterodactyl direction. It has no facades. It doesn't even look finished.

What sets it apart from other car parks is that it is designed as a series of spaces, rather than as a stacking system. Some of the decks have extravagantly high ceilings and some overlook others from mezzanines and balconies. The ramps sweep and splendid views of the city unfurl. Syncopations of high and low decks, and of pillars shaped like Vs, triangles and trapeziums, are set up. There is a nervous energy and, in the thin leading edges of the decks, delicacy.

The things that usually make car parks nasty – low spaces, claustrophobia, bad lighting, sprinklers and lighting stuck to the ceilings – are avoided and a minimal signage system has been created by Wolff Olins, whose other works include Tate's fuzzy logo. The effect is to make the act of parking cars into theatre. It's rumoured that people are asking taxis to drive to the top of the building and down again, just for the fun of it. It turns out that the building is quite Miami after all, if Miami is about showing off and treating the city as a playground.

It must be said that Herzog & de Meuron is not always to be believed when it promises vibrant public space in its projects. It didn't happen in a building called the Barcelona Forum and, reportedly, it hasn't happened as promised in the arcades that wrap the Beijing Stadium.

Christine Binswanger, the partner at Herzog & de Meuron in charge of 1111 Lincoln Road, tells of a nervous phone call from Wennett the day after it opened for business. "Most people don't know what it is," he said. "Those who know what it is think it's unfinished. Those who know it's finished don't know how to get in." When I visited, it wasn't yet humming quite in the way it is supposed to.

Then again, these architects created Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, one of the liveliest modern spaces in Britain, with the help of some impactful art commissions. At 1111, much will depend on levels 2 and 5, where Wennett plans art installations and events, and wedding parties and whatever else people want to do with it, and where photoshoots are already taking place. Whatever happens, it will also be an astonishing place to park your car.

Wennett, who has spent 15 years collecting art and now speaks a bit like an artist, puts it like this: "It's about twisting your sense of where you are. It's about putting you in a different perspective, shaking things up, putting you where you haven't been before." It's hard to disagree.

The greatest work of the artist Frederic, Lord Leighton was not any of his paintings but his house. It is a faintly louche treasury created with the architect George Aitchison over 30 years from 1865, as exotic and iridescent as the stuffed peacock that stands on its stairs. Its centrepiece is the Arab hall, a tiled and gilded orientalist fantasia made of real and imitation Islamic decoration.

The house, in Kensington, west London, was a semi-public display of the life, work and influences of the artist, who lived in a relatively modest bedroom, the only one in the house outside the servants' quarters. It was an environment made of architecture, decoration, works of art and Leighton's own paintings, all working together. As the contents were dispersed after Leighton's death, it has never been quite been the same place since. Now, though, after a £1.6m refurbishment that has reinstated original reds, blues and gold to its colour scheme, a special exhibition has been installed of works from the artist's collection, loaned from their present owners. The Leighton House museum has also acquired ceramics and paintings that are copies of those since dispersed.

The effect is theatrical, part fictional, like the original installation, treading delicately to avoid being a Leightonian theme park. The result is still not quite the cluttered opulence visible in old photographs, but it is closer to the house the artist knew than it has ever been since his death. One of Britain's great interiors, it reopens to the public on Saturday.