Downtown Bryan’s Roy Kelly Garage was funded in part by a program under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which has created a number of architecturally significant buildings in Texas and across the country.
The 385,000-sf concrete-framed garage holds 900 cars on five levels and covers almost two full city blocks that used to be mostly surface parking lots. Appended to its eastern side is a three-story office building housing county government offices and clad in a dark red brick.
The main architectural gesture of the parking garage is what the architects call the “hyperstair.” It runs along the north side of the garage, which faces a courthouse, and consists of a series of cascading exterior stairs partially hidden by silver-colored, pierced metal screens supported on a grid of steel tubes and I-beams. These stairs animate the facade in ways that are very inviting and safe and manage to unite the entire block.
This garage has a scale that works with the buildings and texture of its context, and is a notable monument to the growing urbanism and architectural sophistication of even seemingly small and provincial Texas cities.
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