Car Crash Planter
Kris Lucius
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2008
Asphalt Option Studio | Paula Meijerink | Harvard Graduate School of Design

This project takes into consideration mitigating the heat absorptive quality of parking surfaces contributing to the urban heat island effect. The Car Crash Planter is a fanciful, active element that provides vegetative cover in the absence of a car-- evenly covering the area of each large, generically sized spot that smaller cars leave exposed. When empty, a single-entry lot, like the study site, is 2/3 covered by vigorous, twining vines that grow out along the steel cables of folding steel trellises. Upon entering the spot, a car nudges against the rubber bumper of the trellis, and the force of the car overcomes the resistance of the pneumatic cylinder underneath, compressing the trellis into whatever space is left and creating a new topography within itself. At any given time, the parking surface is either covered by a car or by a planter, providing shade and mitigating solar absorption.