Vertical Park: Turning Parking Towers into Living Urban Ecosystems

What if the most banal piece of urban infrastructure, the parking garage, could clean the air, grow food, and give a neighborhood a public park? The Vertical Park starts with that provocation and pushes it skyward, replacing the familiar concrete slab tower with a hollow, vegetation-clad loop that merges automated car storage with vertical farming, rooftop water features, and glass observation decks. It is a parking structure that refuses to behave like one.

Designed by Omar El Halfawy and Omar Atef, the project received a Jury Commendation in the Yo Parking 2019 competition. Set within a dense urban skyline, the proposal addresses a familiar tension: cities need more parking capacity, but they also desperately need more green space, cleaner air, and stronger community infrastructure. The designers' answer is to collapse all of those demands into a single vertical figure.

A Hollow Loop Rising Above the Skyline

The tower's defining gesture is its form: a slender arch, or U-shaped loop, that rises as two tapering legs and reconnects at the top. The shape is deliberately porous. Rather than presenting a monolithic wall to the city, the hollow center allows natural light and wind to pass through the structure, ventilating the parking bays and farming zones stacked within. The aerial rendering makes this legible instantly: cascading vegetation drapes the exterior while the open core ensures the building breathes.

The programmatic diagram breaks the loop into clearly defined zones. Automated multi-level parking occupies the lower and mid sections, where mechanical slots eliminate ramps and maximize spatial efficiency while integrating EV charging docks. Above that, controlled-environment vertical farming produces food and generates oxygen using significantly less land and water than conventional agriculture. Green roofs, glass floor observation areas, and a rooftop pond and waterfall system cap the structure, creating a microclimate that actively reduces surrounding heat and smog.

A Green Envelope of Oak and Climbing Vegetation

At dusk, the plant-covered arch glows against the waterfront like a second geological formation. The green envelope is not decorative wallpaper; it performs. Climbing vegetation and locally sourced oak wood framing soften the urban skyline while providing insulation and shade. Perforated metal mesh panels sit beneath the planting, handling ventilation and noise control for the parking levels inside. The material palette is deliberately low-tech and climate-responsive, leaning on biophilic principles rather than energy-intensive mechanical systems.

The street-level view is equally telling. Framed by neighboring office buildings, the tower reads not as a parking garage but as a vertical park that happens to store cars. Public accessibility is a core design ambition: teleferics, glass observation decks, and gathering spaces invite citizens into what would otherwise be a closed utilitarian box. The designers argue, convincingly, that parking infrastructure should give back to the city at every level, not just at the ground floor lobby.

Section Logic: Stacking Ecology and Efficiency

The section drawing strips away the greenery and reveals the structural skeleton: two tapering legs connected at the crown, with planting zones distributed across floors and within the building envelope itself. Internal circulation serves both the automated parking system and the public programme, keeping vehicle movement separate from pedestrian experience. The rooftop waterfall feeds downward through the structure, contributing to a natural cooling cycle that counteracts the heat island effect typically generated by concrete-heavy developments.

What the section makes clear is that every square meter is pulling double duty. Parking bays sit behind farming walls. Structural framing doubles as planting trellises. Glass floors serve both as observation platforms and as daylight conduits for lower levels. The layering is ambitious, and while the concept would face significant engineering challenges at full scale, the spatial logic is disciplined enough to feel plausible rather than purely utopian.

Why This Project Matters

Most parking garage redesigns stop at wrapping a conventional structure in a nicer skin. El Halfawy and Atef go further by questioning the entire program. Their Vertical Park does not merely accommodate cars; it leverages the vertical real estate that parking demands to address food production, air quality, public recreation, and urban cooling simultaneously. The hollow loop form is the key move: it transforms a normally introverted building type into something permeable, visible, and communal.

The project's strength lies in its refusal to treat sustainability as an add-on. The rooftop pond, the vertical farming, the oak and mesh envelope, the automated systems that eliminate ramps and reduce the building's footprint: these are not features bolted onto a parking garage, they are the parking garage. That integration is exactly the kind of thinking high-density cities will need as they retrofit their infrastructure for climate resilience. The Vertical Park proposes that the most mundane buildings in a city could become its most ecologically productive ones.

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About the Designers

Designers: Omar El Halfawy, Omar Atef

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Project credits: The Vertical Park by Omar El Halfawy, Omar Atef Yo Parking 2019 (uni.xyz).