Art and Culture, Experience Design, Explorations

Every day I walk through a parking lot to get Idea Couture. The lot is sandwiched between a dance studio and a Starbucks and is, for the most part, flat and dreary. Most parking lots are like this – purely functional without any personality.

Houndstooth Pattern in Parking Lot, at Disney World, FL by Alex MacLean

Aesthetically, the impervious asphalt surface lacks dimension; a visual void of white lines on a graying black canvas, it is splashed with a temporary palette of colors during business and shopping hours only. Culturally, the business of automobile storage squanders social space; vacant for all but the most shallow of interactions, it is a transitional zone designed to send people out rather than draw them in. A few innovations in vertical parking exist today. Others meant to green the ground-level void are underway. And there is talk of some cities developing municipal ordinances and review processes to refashion the parking lots of the future. In the meantime, citizens of the cities and suburbs need an immediate innovation in reclamation.

Painted Parking by Benjamin Moore changes the aesthetic of parking lots. Drawing on its network of 4000 independent retailers across North America and their relationships with local customers, it partners the world’s leading paint manufacturer with home-owners, artists, community centers, schools, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, architects, contractors and designers to take back and transform the asphalt. For urban and suburban communities, Painted Parking becomes a collaborative space where people gather on weekends to interact, explore the arts, express themselves and improve their neighborhood one parking space at a time. For cities, malls, parking management firms and land developers, Painted Parking is a quick, cultural solution to the aesthetic blight of squandered space.

For global brands and local businesses, Painted Parking presents a new opportunity to engage consumers in the creation of customized advertising – one that might pave new avenues for CSR should those businesses and brands financially reward community centers, schools, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides for their artistic efforts. And for Benjamin Moore, it offers more than simply an opportunity to educate consumers on product uses, colors and innovations. Painted Parking is a natural extension of a brand philosophy that believes paint and painting have the power to create beauty and to invoke transformation with every brush stroke.