A typical Ikea store comes with a sprawling parking lot—in Burbank, California, for example, the lot has room for 1,700 cars. But as the company works to shrink its carbon footprint, including the pollution from customers driving to suburban stores, it’s also rethinking parking. A new seven-store building that will house an Ikea store in central Vienna, now under construction, will have zero parking spaces.
“The whole building is geared towards pedestrians, subway and streetcar riders, and cyclists—there is no space for cars,” the company writes in German on a store website. The location is next to a tram stop and a three-minute walk from a subway station; like other parts of the city, it’s easily accessible by bike. Anything that customers can’t easily carry away will be delivered from a new logistics center farther away (and soon, as with other Ikea stores, those deliveries will happen via electric delivery vans). “Our concept is that parking spaces are not needed, because there are no products to buy that require a car,” the website says. The company’s stores in other large cities are beginning to take similar approaches; there’s a store in Manhattan that serves solely as a showroom.
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The roof, which is open even at times Ikea is not, serves as a public park. The building is also surrounded by greenery as another part of its sustainability strategy. The “urban heat island” effect, the fact that cities covered in heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt tend to get hotter than the surrounding countryside, can be mitigated with plants; as Vienna deals with increasing heatwaves fueled by climate change, the city is now deliberately adding new parks and encouraging architects to incorporate cooling strategies. The Ikea building is designed with a nearly 15-foot setback on all sides to make room for balconies planted with large trees.
On all of the facades, plus the roof, there are a total of 160 trees. “That’s many more than would have been able to be planted on the site itself,” says Dunkl.
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Edited by Victoria Watcher, 21 January 2020 - 08:43 AM.