Perq-an Innovative Parking Product

Randy Vandewater, Perq Director, Swinerton

Imagine a solution that simplifies the need to design parking so that architects, owners, and contractors alike can focus their efforts on other parts of the project. For a full-service design studio and general contractor, parking structures are not an after-thought. That’s why Walker Consultants and Swinerton teamed up and created a data- and design-driven parking solution called Perq.

Walker and Swinerton worked together to optimize both the parking design and construction process, creating a modularized parking structure that is scalable from 300 to 1100 cars. By working as a team, we have also created a parking product that is repeatable and easy to build, which provides both schedule and cost certainty for the client.

A typical parking structure project can require 23 months from the planning through to final delivery. Teams often start from scratch with conceptualizing the project, spending weeks on design meetings to lock in the program and complete the structural design. Perq eliminates these early steps, allowing owners to save up to nine months in the procurement and design process and one month in construction, cutting the timeline nearly in half.

With Perq, our team only needs weeks to review site-specific conditions to confirm the existing engineering, and then we are ready to submit our plans for permitting with the local jurisdiction. Perq also offers several preselected options to clad the exterior of the building. This pre-project effort gives the client a variety of options, eliminates questions in the field by the builder, and keeps a project on schedule

Perq structures are either two or three bays wide, and range from three to six levels. Clients can submit their site’s parameters on our Perq app to immediately generate recommended design options that provide the parking they need. Around 90 percent of the design and engineering elements for Perq are already developed with only the site and slope requirements needed for the foundation work. Finally, owners can then select from a menu of skin and finish options to complete the design of their product. These parameters fit 60 percent to 80 percent of the parking structures that Swinerton and Walker have worked on in the past.

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Innovation drove the creation of Perq. The latest technologies are used to create shop drawings from the model and track production rates in the field, providing continuous feedback to our project teams. The product is standard cast-in-place structural concrete, with the column formwork pre-fabricated and stored at our facility in Riverside, California. This formwork can then be shipped to any job site in the country, eliminating delays and waste through this repeatable process. This repeatability also translates to components like elevators, stairs, and skin elements on the garage; ultimately also allowing subcontractors to work faster and more efficiently on projects once they’ve completed their first Perq structure.

Taking care of the parking structure component of a construction project early on can speed along a project’s entire timeline. Through innovation, prefabrication, and a data-driven approach, Perq is a first-of-its-kind solution that simplifies parking design.