AMONG US: Parasitic Green Cages That Turn Private Skyscraper Facades into Public Ground

The skyscraper has always been generous with its views and stingy with its access. Its upper floors hold the most valuable air in the city, yet that air belongs to whoever holds the lease. AMONG US asks a pointed question: what if the outside of the tower, the one surface every citizen already looks at, became a place every citizen could occupy? The answer is a family of red steel cages, thick with planting, that latch onto existing high-rises and turn their facades into a vertical public realm.

Designed by Parth Gurnani and shortlisted in Parasitic Architecture 2020, the project refuses to demolish, replace, or heavily alter its host buildings. Instead it adds modular public environments to their skins: gardens, viewing platforms, meeting places, and potential air-purifying landscapes. The parasite here is benign, even corrective. It feeds on surplus facade area and returns it to the city as shared ground.

The Plaza Steps as a Threshold Being Renegotiated

The opening render places us exactly where the argument starts: at the foot of a glass tower, on the wide steps of an entrance plaza. This is the classic corporate threshold, a space that looks public but whose ownership, management, and rules often limit how freely it is used. Gurnani lets the red cages, draped in ivy, slip into this setting almost casually, and the effect is to blur the line the plaza was designed to draw.

What matters in this image is the contrast of registers. The curtain wall is smooth, reflective, and closed; the steel frames are open, porous, and overgrown. The project positions itself as a new spatial layer between building and city, and the render makes that layer legible before any diagram explains it. People crossing in warm light read as participants rather than visitors on borrowed land.

From Seagram's Single Void to a Scatter of Elevated Rooms

The presentation board carries the project's sharpest piece of thinking. Gurnani references the setback of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, completed in 1958, where pulling the tower back from the property line produced an open plaza and, eventually, the logic behind privately owned public spaces, or POPS. That model depends on land: one large horizontal void on one site. In today's dense commercial districts, that land is scarce and expensive.

AMONG US takes the Seagram void and breaks it into pieces, then lifts those pieces up the building. The plan, section, and tower elevation show cage-shaped planted platforms clinging to a grid-patterned facade, distributed rather than concentrated. It is a shift from reading the city in plan to reading it in section, and it reframes the facade as an available site where ground-level space has run out.

An Avenue Canopied by Hanging Gardens

At street scale, the proposal stops being about a single tower and becomes about a district. The rendering of a busy avenue shows red planted cages hanging overhead across several buildings, with pedestrians and traffic moving below under a partly cloudy sky. The platforms can be set at different heights and attached to multiple hosts, and together they form a network of elevated public rooms rather than one central park.

This is where the parasitic strategy earns its keep. A park needs a parcel; this system only needs anchoring points. The repeated red frames also give the network a recognisable identity, so that a passer-by can read each cage as part of a shared civic infrastructure rather than another private amenity bolted on for tenants.

Stacked Planters, a Steel Frame, and a Planting Palette

The axonometric strips the idea down to its kit of parts: a host tower, stacked curved planter platforms, the red steel cage that holds them, and a panel of plant species. Separating the frame from the planting is a smart move. The steel gives structure and a readable edge; the planters carry soil, vegetation, and the ecological ambition of an air-purifying landscape.

The modular logic is what makes the proposal plausible as an urban strategy rather than a one-off sculpture. Units can be added where facades allow and inserted into existing enclaves where ground space is limited. The diagram stops short of resolving access, loads, and maintenance in detail, but it sets out a clear system that those questions could be tested against.

Why This Project Matters

Much of the conversation about sustainable architecture fixates on new buildings and better performance. AMONG US looks at the towers we already have and treats their exteriors as underused public assets. By turning the facade into something active, occupied, and ecologically productive, it argues that sustainability includes who gets to use a building, not only how much energy it consumes.

Its real contribution is the reading of POPS history. Taking the Seagram setback, a single void bought with land, and redistributing it vertically as many small planted rooms is a clear, transferable idea for cities where the ground is already spoken for. As a shortlisted entry, it shows how a parasitic intervention can be critical of private power and still propose something hopeful in its place.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Parth Gurnani

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Project credits: AMONG US by Parth Gurnani Parasitic Architecture 2020 (uni.xyz).