Bridging over 7 lanes of the newly tunneled Presidio Parkway, Presidio Tunnel Tops is a 14-acre national park that reconnects San Francisco with the Bay.
Rethinking The Future Awards 2025
First Award | Public Landscape (Built)
Project Name: Presidio Tunnel Tops
Category: Public Landscape (Built)
Studio Name: Field Operations
Design Team:
Client: The Presidio Trust
Design Lead, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design: Field Operations
Architecture & Facilities: EHDD
Area: 14 acres
Year: 2022
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Photography Credits:
Sheet 1: © Field Operations
Sheets 2-6: © Caitlin Atkinson
Render Credits: N/A
Other Credits:
Creating a new, pedestrian-focused connection between the Presidio’s historic Main Post and the waterfront below, the park has become a central place for community with a network of trails, bluff landscapes, meadows, dynamic overlooks, and spaces for gathering.
The park balances essential community spaces, including a new transit center, visitor center, campfire circle, and youth campus with an innovative play and learning environment, with open space inspired by the sites natural and cultural history. Working in an incredible setting with a 360-degree panoramic horizon, the design focuses on choreographing each pathway, furnishing and feature so that every perch feels like the absolute best place to view the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay, while prioritizing accessibility over the 40-foot grade change.
Incorporating sustainability goals throughout the project, half of the new buildings and the majority of the custom site furnishings are constructed from salvaged Monterrey Cypress trees that have been harvested from the Presidio Trust’s reforestation efforts. Most notably is a series of sculpted, over-sized seating benches that resemble massive-scaled driftwood shaped to provide generous social spaces to take in the scene.
Reclaiming over 6-hectares of former highway infrastructure for new park use, Presidio Tunnel Tops promotes relevant principles of ecological sustainability, urban regeneration, adaptive reuse over new construction, and inclusionary planning, design, and programming. The project achieved ReScape (Bay Friendly Rated) certification as well as met all California Water Efficient Ordinance requirements.
With over 180 species and 200,000 native and climate-adapted plants carefully chosen for the site to restore ecologically valuable plant communities, the park represents a transformation from highway and barrier to public asset with ecological benefits. Presidio Tunnel Tops emerges as a layered and evolving ecological framework, blending historic landscapes with forward-thinking restoration strategies. The planting strategy embraces succession and adaptation—younger plantings establish resilience against the site’s prevailing winds, and the landscape itself evolves with time. The result is a living, breathing ecological system that supports biodiversity and amplifies the sensory experience of the park.
The design process embraced an inclusive and iterative engagement model, transforming public input into a fundamental design driver. The team orchestrated a series of workshops, briefings, and outreach events, ensuring that thousands of San Franciscans could contribute their ideas, priorities, and visions for the park. Attendees sketched, wrote, and debated ideas, generating insights that directly shaped design decisions. Requests for expanded picnic spaces, optimally scaled lawns, and diverse activity zones were woven into the evolving framework, ensuring that Tunnel Tops would feel both expansive and intimate, structured yet organic.
Within its first year since opening in July 2022, Presidio Tunnel Tops hosted nearly 2 million visitors, welcomed 100 community-based organizations, and featured a dozen community-curated events, drawing thousands across the Bay. The expansion of the park is underway to create more amenities that support nature-based play space, with the new Outpost Meadow opening in 2025.
