Junglefy - Manly Vale Car Park

The Manly Vale commuter car park is part of the NSW Government’s transport solution for Sydney’s northern beaches. This multi-storey car park, located on the B-Line bus route provides 150 car spaces for commuters to park their car and travel to the city. The car park is the first project in the world to use Junglefy’s innovative rotating Breathing Walls. The panels rotate 180 degrees to provide easy and safe access for ongoing plant maintenance. The Breathing Walls will provide clean air and noise reduction for locals as well as providing a habitat for local biodiversity and an aesthetic design for an otherwise bland-looking building. James Griffin MP, Member for Manly, said “This is an exciting step towards creating more sustainable designs for infrastructure and we are excited to be working with one of Australia’s leading living infrastructure specialists, Junglefy, to provide a green solution for the Northern Beaches.”

Our Role

Junglefy designed the innovative rotating Breathing Wall model as a bespoke solution for the Manly Vale car park to assist with safe and easy plant maintenance. The design was engineered to fit the custom requirements of the car park, with Breathing Wall panels installed on three sides of the building. Junglefy provides regular and seasonal maintenance of the Breathing Walls as part of the ongoing maintenance contract. Junglefy have undertaken extensive plant research for this project to select species that encourage biodiversity and specifically, pollinating insects. The plants used throughout the car park are a mix of natives and exotics that provide a year-round food source for pollinators. The exotic plants used have been specifically chosen for their ability to attract pollinators. We concentrated the pollinator-attracting plants on the sunny western wall of the car park as pollinators like to forage for food in bright, warm and sunny positions. Grouping those plant species in one area provides a dense food source, making foraging easier. The plants provide a variety of food sources for the insects with some plants providing pollen and others providing nectar. This variation is important as pollinating insects require nectar for fast complex carbohydrates for energy and pollen is used to store for their young and to convert into honey.

Key Innovation

As the Manly Vale car park is on a major road, regular maintenance of the plants would present safety issues for our maintenance team. The rotating Breathing Wall design, created specifically for this project, enables easy installation and year-round maintenance to be done safely and efficiently without disruption to traffic or the B-Line bus services. This innovative model extends the application of Breathing Walls and green walls to areas that would have traditionally been too difficult to include vertical gardens.