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View of the proposed structure from the street.

FRONT ELEVATION: The structure blends as a landscape element.

Amalgamation of infrastructure and public space design – a composite space.

Section through the building with the terrace gardens.

Present site condition as a parking lot.

Proposed urban terrace garden and the structure footprint.

View of the proposed structure from the street.

FRONT ELEVATION: The structure blends as a landscape element.

Amalgamation of infrastructure and public space design – a composite space.

Section through the building with the terrace gardens.

Present site condition as a parking lot.

Proposed urban terrace garden and the structure footprint.

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Infrastructure and landscape, generally seen as two distinct domains of design are explored in the design of Shinjuku Gardens by Hong Kong-based cheungvogl to re-imagine a mundane building typology – an urban parking lot.

The core areas of our cities world over face the same problems- congestion, dense developments, vehicular overloading and pollution. Hong Kong-based architecture and design firm cheungvogl re-establish the idea of landscape as an amalgamation of environment and infrastructure through a proposal for conversion of a parking lot into an urban green. Shinjuku Gardens is a proposal to convert an eighty car parking lot into an urban green feature to increase the parking capacity and to re-think a typical multi-level car park. The attempt is to replace the existing ground parking lot into by a greener, multi-functional and alternative design incorporating landscape design as an infrastructural element.

Tokyo is a dense city. Green spaces for public access are few and far in-between. Owing to an acute scarcity of land in the inner city, the proposal aims to stack the car park by creating a multi-level concrete frame thus freeing space on the ground. The idea is to accommodate 200 cars in place of 80 that the space is presently accommodating and taking the intervention a level further to create a green space for public use on the roof of this highly rational structure. The concrete frame of the proposed parking lot will have ‘balustrades of grass’ as an external skin providing a soft cladding to the rigid concrete frame and compensating for the carbon emissions of the cars within. The skin is meant to blend the structure pleasantly in its surroundings.

A ramp takes a pedestrian to the roof of the structure which is landscaped to form an urban park returning the space of the footprint of the structure back to the city. The structure, though an infrastructural element acts as an urban landscape design contributing to the congested neighbourhood of the inner city of Tokyo. The architects also propose to make the walls and structural elements of the parking lot open to public art making the entire structure a museum for street-art and graffiti and involving the people to make this mundane building type an interesting urban feature. 

As the number of automobiles infuse our cities and induce congestion, multi-level parking lots come across as the most obvious and practical solution to make space for the automobile. Shinjuku Gardens propose a fresh alternative to the monotony of a structural frame of a multi-level car park integrating landscape design, urban infrastructure and public-interest design into an alternative, future typology of an urban landscape.

Text:    Ruturaj Parikh  

Images: courtesy cheungvogl

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