What a Parking Garage and a Pritzker Winner Have in Common

What a Pritzker Building and a Parking Garage Actually Share

Concrete is the most widely used construction material on earth. Consequently, it appears in virtually every building type — from cultural institutions to utility structures, from civic landmarks to highway retaining walls. The material itself is identical whether it ends up in an award-winning museum or a municipal parking deck.

What differs is the decision made at the forming stage. A formliner introduces texture, pattern, and visual character directly into the concrete surface as it cures. That single decision determines whether the finished structure reads as generic infrastructure or as something considered, intentional, and connected to its surroundings. Furthermore, it's a decision that costs a fraction of what most people assume.

This is the insight that connects a Pritzker Prize laureate to a parking structure designer. Both work with concrete. However, one group consistently treats the surface as a design opportunity, while the other treats it as a default. The result — not the budget — is what separates them.

How Award-Winning Architects Use Concrete Texture

The Pritzker Architecture Prize — often described as architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize — has consistently recognized architects whose work demonstrates mastery of materiality. Notably, concrete appears throughout the portfolios of many of the award's most celebrated recipients.

Tadao Ando: Texture as Spatial Experience

Tadao Ando, awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1995, built an entire architectural philosophy around the expressive surface of concrete. His Church of the Light, the Museum of Wood Culture, and numerous residential projects use deeply considered concrete textures to define spatial character. Specifically, the interplay between light, shadow, and surface relief in his work demonstrates how a forming decision — made before a single cubic yard of concrete is poured — shapes the experience of a finished space.

Liu Jiakun: Concrete as Cultural Memory

Liu Jiakun, the 2025 Pritzker Prize winner, uses exposed concrete walls as primary architectural surfaces throughout his body of work. In his Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum — a building set in a bamboo forest in Chengdu — exposed concrete walls create the primary atmosphere of the interior. Additionally, his approach consistently treats the concrete surface not as a substrate waiting for a finish, but as the finish itself. The texture of the wall is the design.

That description of Liu Jiakun's work — buildings that function simultaneously as infrastructure and public space — applies equally well to what architectural formliners accomplish on sound walls, bridge abutments, and retaining walls. The ambition is the same. The technology is the same. Only the scale and setting differ.

The Perceived Gap vs. the Real Gap

The conventional assumption is that architectural concrete quality scales directly with budget. Landmark buildings have landmark budgets; therefore, they get landmark surfaces. Parking garages, retaining walls, and utility structures have utilitarian budgets; therefore, they get utilitarian finishes.

However, this assumption misidentifies where the real gap lies. The difference in surface quality between an award-winning concrete building and a bare-grey parking deck is not primarily a function of budget. It is a function of when the surface question gets asked.

The Specification Timing Problem

On prestigious architectural projects, the surface of the concrete is a design question that gets resolved in schematic design — sometimes before the structural engineer is engaged. By contrast, on infrastructure and utility projects, the surface question often gets addressed as an afterthought, if at all, after structural and mechanical decisions have already been locked in.

Consequently, the gap between good and forgettable concrete is primarily a gap in timing and intention — not in technology or budget. Architectural concrete formliners cost a fraction of what most non-specialists assume. Moreover, they add negligible complexity to the forming and casting process when specified correctly from the start.

What Actually Separates Good Concrete from Forgettable Concrete

If budget isn't the primary differentiator, what is? Based on decades of working alongside architects, contractors, and precasters across every project type and scale, the answer comes down to four decisions — none of which require a landmark budget to execute well.

Everyday Applications, Extraordinary Results

The project types that benefit most from this democratized access to architectural concrete quality are precisely the ones that have historically received the least design attention.

A Decision Framework for Any Budget

The goal isn't to turn every parking garage into a Pritzker-caliber building. Rather, it's to ask one question at the right moment in every project: what should this concrete surface communicate?

That question, asked early enough to influence the specification, costs nothing. The answer drives pattern selection, material choice, and seam strategy — all of which happen within the normal scope of a forming and casting decision. Consequently, the upgrade from bare grey concrete to a considered architectural surface requires less budget than most teams assume, and less complexity than most contractors fear.