Madison Square Gardens: A Mass Timber Vertical Farm That Turns the Manhattan Skyscraper into Public Ground

Manhattan's towers have long measured their worth in rentable square feet. Madison Square Gardens measures it in something else: how many vegetables, how much shade, and how many neighbours a tall building can hold. The proposal takes the most privatised object in the city and turns it into a growing frame. Its height serves food production, learning and leisure rather than premium floor plates.

Designed by Nicholas Jeffway, the project was selected as an Editor's Choice entry in CityScraper 2020. Jeffway places the tower inside Madison Square Park itself, a provocative choice that reads the building as an extension of the park rather than an intrusion on it. The programme combines a vertical farm, a mass timber megastructure, rainwater management, a public marketplace, an auditorium, classrooms, recreation areas and community gardens. It is all organised under a public-private model aimed at community health and food access rather than corporate identity.

Catwalks Thread Through Tiers of Cultivation

The opening view sets the project's terms. A ramped catwalk slips between stepped beds of greenery, and visitors pause to look down toward the park courtyard below. Jeffway does not hide agriculture behind a facade or bury it in a sealed hydroponic box. Crops sit on rotating frameworks spread through an open structural volume. Pedestrian routes weave directly among the planting racks, giving workers and the public the same access to the vertical landscape.

That openness does double duty. It lets daylight reach deeper into the growing areas, and it makes harvesting, learning and casual movement part of one continuous spatial experience. The farm becomes a place you walk through, not a utility you are kept away from. That is the proposal's sharpest departure from the typical vertical farm render.

A Timber Frame That Holds Both Play and Park

Inside, the mass timber megastructure is made legible rather than concealed. Diagonal cross-bracing runs against a glazed wall in the recreation space, where low raking light falls on two figures and a basketball. The bracing reads as structure and as spatial rhythm at once. It is a reminder that this tower is built from timber, not glass curtain wall and steel, and that its sustainability claims begin with the material.

At ground level, the tower base rises above a sloped wooden pavilion, with park paths and autumn trees running right up to it. The transition matters. Instead of a lobby with security turnstiles, the building meets the city through a pavilion that belongs to the park's own circulation. Jeffway treats the base as a threshold for public life, which makes the claim of civic infrastructure believable.

Community Gardens Lifted into the Sky

Higher up, an elevated community garden deck brings planted beds under a heavy timber ceiling, edged by orange mesh railings. People gather here in daylight, and the scene feels closer to a neighbourhood allotment than an observation deck. This is where the brief's concern with unequal access to fresh food takes physical form. Residents are invited to grow produce themselves, not only to receive it.

The proposal pairs these gardens with a broader distribution idea. Food grown in the tower could supply nearby communities, local grocers, restaurants and the building's own public marketplace. The architecture plugs into a local food network instead of standing apart from it, and that systemic thinking gives the community decks real purpose.

Reading the Tower as a Stack of Systems

The exploded axonometric pulls the proposal apart into its constituent layers: the timber tower, the vertical farm modules and the park pavilion. Annotated callouts explain how each part works. The drawing makes clear that Madison Square Gardens is less a single form than an assembly of interlocking systems. Structure, cultivation, water management and public programme are each given their own logic, then stacked into one urban framework.

This is the most persuasive image in the set because it shows the thinking rather than the atmosphere. Farm modules nest within the structural frame, the pavilion grounds the whole assembly in the park, and the reader can trace how a skyscraper might be reorganised around production and public use. Without it, the scheme risks looking like greenery applied to a tower.

Why This Project Matters

Madison Square Gardens broadens what sustainable architecture can mean. Energy performance and low-carbon materials are part of it, and the mass timber structure and rainwater system cover that ground. But Jeffway pushes further, arguing that food access, education, recreation and public participation are sustainability questions too. A tower that grows vegetables for its neighbours and teaches children in its classrooms contributes to the resilience of a city in ways a carbon calculation alone cannot capture.

Placing the tower inside a beloved public park will spark debate, and it should. The proposal deliberately tests whether a skyscraper can earn its place in civic space by giving back more ground than it takes. As a CityScraper entry, it succeeds by replacing the question of how tall a building can go with a more useful one: what the city gets in return for its height.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Nicholas Jeffway

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Project credits: Madison Square Gardens by Nicholas Jeffway CityScraper 2020 (uni.xyz).