Explore the future of mobility & parking space
Speculative design · autonomous mobility · the intelligence layer of the built environment
I imagined an urban system where autonomous vehicles never truly stop — a fleet in constant, coordinated motion, more like a circulatory system than a fleet of parked objects. If cars no longer need to rest, the spaces we built to hold them become free: parking structures become parks, drone ports, or kinetic-energy zones; roads become fluid transit bands; the static city becomes a living one.
The hard problems are where the digital and physical meet. How does a person step into a moving system safely — docking hubs, mobile platforms, choreographed handoffs? How do thousands of vehicles negotiate space without a single point of failure?
These aren't just design questions; they're coordination, perception, and prediction problems — the kind of real-world AI has to solve to make a city feel intuitive instead of chaotic.
I had some crazy “What if” thoughts…
What if a parking space only exists when occupied — pavement that lifts, retracts, or grows grass the moment a car leaves?
What if buildings competed for cars instead of cars competing for spots, lowering their own price to pull you in?
What if garages became vertical farms, drone aviaries, or kinetic floors that harvest the energy of the cars rolling through?
What if the city had moods — congested when stressed, fluid when calm — and you could feel the system's emotional state through how space moved around you?
What if the parking spot shrinks to fit each car's exact size — and the leftover inches get auctioned in real time to the car next to it?
01 · Sketch — Tracing the bones of a parking garage
I started from the as-built plan of an existing parking structure, tracing its footprint in hand drawing and Rhino — the perimeter ramp loop, the helical spiral ramp, and the repeating structural bays.
02 · Base — From lines to a working shell
The traced geometry was extruded into a base shell — perimeter walls, the curved vehicle loop, and the interior partition grid. This locked in the site logic and the circulation skeleton before any volume decisions were made.
03 · Mass — Turning flat decks into inhabitable volume.
I pushed the primary masses upward to study scale and density (arrows mark the extrusions), converting horizontal parking decks into occupiable blocks. The goal here was to find the right ratio of solid to void — how much program the footprint could actually hold.
04 · Tweak — Subdividing for rhythm
The large blocks were split into smaller, staggered volumes. This introduced gaps for daylight, sightlines, and pedestrian movement between buildings — the difference between a single megastructure and a navigable cluster of buildings.
05 · Sculpt — Articulating the volumes
Each volume was then carved and detailed: terraces, setbacks, louvered faces, stepped sections, and openings. This is where the masses stopped being abstract boxes and started reading as architecture you could walk up to and into.
06 · Form — Resolving the district
In the final form, skybridges and stairs/escalators stitch the volumes together, the old spiral ramp is reborn as a linear green park, and the space is populated with people and vehicles. Crucially, the cars now live only on the outer loop — the interior is entirely pedestrian.
07 · Development
The final renders overlay the movement network onto the built form: autonomous vehicles enter and exit on the perimeter loop while people flow through the car-free core. The highlighted paths represent the invisible coordination layer that routes both — the literal point where the digital city and the physical city meet.
