Mr. Wennett told the architects that he wanted something close to the grand hall of a train station  big, airy, light-filled and head-turning. What they produced, in early 2010, was all those things: a garage with floor heights of up to 34 feet, three times the norm; a striking internal staircase, with artwork embedded in its base; precarious looking (and feeling) ledges that rely on industrial-strength cable to hold back cars and people; and a glass cube that houses a designer clothing store, perhaps the first in the middle of a parking garage.

In a final flourish, the architects created a soaring top floor that doubles as an event space, with removable parking barriers. It can be rented for about $12,000 to $15,000 a night.

“This is not a parking garage,” Mr. Wennett said. “It’s really a civic space.”

And a private home. Mr. Wennett built himself a large penthouse apartment on the roof.

A handful of well-known architects have dabbled, reluctantly, in parking  in the 1960s, Paul Rudolph, dean of architecture at Yale, designed a giant garage in downtown New Haven. But it seemed to reinforce rather than buck convention, with its dark corridors and imposing scale.

The structure in Miami Beach, by contrast, “sets a new bar for what parking garages could and should be,” said Cathy Leff, the director of the Wolfsonian museum of design here. Garages in Miami and around the country, in their attempts to blend in, she said, “become the most identifiable buildings because they are these big, hideous boxes.”