Reverse Park: A Manhattan Tower That Dismantles Cars Instead of Storing Them

What if the best thing a parking garage could do is make cars disappear? Reverse Park takes this provocation literally. Situated in Manhattan, the tower accepts vehicles not for storage but for systematic disassembly, channeling their raw materials back into the city as bike racks, street furniture, public seating, and rain-collecting installations. The building operates as a vertical production hub where every car that enters is broken down into aluminum, steel, glass, and plastic, each material routed to specialized workshop floors for processing and repurposing.

Designed by Joe Maguire and Lorna Lovatt, Reverse Park was shortlisted in the Yo Parking 2019 competition. The project confronts Manhattan's vehicular density head-on, proposing an incentive structure in which residents who relinquish their cars receive lifetime public transport access. It is less a building than a mechanism for behavioral and material transformation: architecture deployed as infrastructure for a circular economy.

A Tower Built from the Cars It Consumes

The axonometric view reveals Reverse Park rising among Manhattan's white context buildings, its facades a patchwork of red, yellow, and patterned panels. These are not decorative choices. As more residents opt into the program and surrender their vehicles, panels fabricated from recycled car parts progressively replace the traditional facade. The building's skin becomes a living record of participation, a mosaic that visually tracks the city's shift away from car dependency.

The elevation drawing clarifies the internal logic: four vertical banks of stacked cars, serviced by mechanical track systems and car lifts, feed vehicles into designated drop-off areas. Red structural fins articulate the facade and provide lateral bracing. The tower is organized so that cars enter at grade and ascend through a sequence of workshop floors, each dedicated to stripping specific components. It reads less like a parking structure and more like a vertical factory with a clear material flow from intake to output.

Material Afterlives: From Car Parts to City Furniture

The outputs of deconstruction are where the project's ambition becomes tangible. A detailed isometric drawing shows one product: a bike parking structure with slatted walls assembled from reclaimed materials, complete with a planted roof. The structure accommodates bicycles and pedestrians, directly replacing the infrastructure that cars once demanded with something lighter, greener, and community-scaled.

A companion diagram breaks down the modular street furniture system, showing how recycled steel and plastic are configured into planting beds, seating elements, and hybrid public utility objects. The logic is systematic: specific car components map to specific urban objects. Aluminum wheels become structural frames, plastic interiors become seating surfaces, and the resulting pieces populate the streetscapes freed up by fewer vehicles. The circular loop closes when reclaimed green space and pedestrian zones are furnished entirely by the cars that once congested them.

Inside the Machine: A Driver's Last View

The most compelling image in the set is shot from inside a car looking upward through the tower's interior. Perforated red and yellow facade panels filter daylight across stacked vehicles awaiting their turn for disassembly. The perspective is deliberately cinematic: it places the viewer in the driver's seat at the moment of surrender, looking up into the mechanism that will convert their vehicle into something else entirely. It captures the emotional and spatial threshold between private car ownership and collective urban benefit.

Why This Project Matters

Reverse Park reframes the parking structure, one of the most ubiquitous and least questioned building types, as a site of material and social transformation. The incentive model is sharply conceived: offering lifetime transit access in exchange for a car creates a feedback loop where the building's success accelerates its own evolution. Fewer cars mean more green space, more pedestrian zones, and a facade that literally changes as participation grows.

Maguire and Lovatt push past the familiar territory of adaptive reuse to propose something more radical: not the reuse of a building, but the reuse of the objects a building type was designed to hold. The result is a prototype that challenges architects and planners to see vertical space not as storage but as processing, and to treat the car itself not as a permanent fixture of city life but as a temporary material deposit waiting to be reclaimed.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Joe Maguire, Lorna Lovatt

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Project credits: Reverse Park by Joe Maguire, Lorna Lovatt Yo Parking 2019 (uni.xyz).