Alumni Parking Pavilion wins state award

	Lehigh's Alumni Parking Pavilion was recognized at the Pennsylvania Parking Association’s 2007 Parking Conference, Workshop, and Exhibition.

Lehigh recently received an award for the Alumni Parking Pavilion at the Pennsylvania Parking Association’s 2007 Parking Conference, Workshop, and Exhibition.

The award, which was accepted on behalf of Lehigh by Chris Christian, director of transportation and parking services, is for Excellence in Innovation and Design of a new parking facility of less than 550 spaces. Lehigh’s Alumni Parking Pavilion was up against the local Allentown Transportation Center and the Medallion Parking Facility in Scranton, Pa.

“We put a lot of thought and planning into the Alumni Parking Pavilion,” Christian said. “Winning the award for innovation really supports our current goals of bringing increased technology and efficiency to transportation and parking on campus.”

Tony Corallo, associate vice president for facilities services and campus planning, played an instrumental part in the planning and design of the Pavilion.

“It was a difficult design challenge that required a very creative solution,” he said. “Placing a 315-car garage next to the Alumni Memorial Building, one of our most beautiful and historic buildings on campus, and then creating an arrival court that would welcome visitors and prospective students to Lehigh without mitigating the strength of the architecture, was quite a struggle.”

Lehigh’s architects, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, created a solution to the problem that complements the Alumni Memorial Building by designing the north facade of the garage to be a shingled, fritted-glass wall. In front of this glass facade is a garden and a twenty-foot-high stone wall that faces the arrival court. This wall, made from a similar stone that was used on the Alumni Memorial Building, ties the two buildings together and breaks down the scale of the garage, making the arrival court a very comfortable and attractive place.

--Brynn Buskirk