Evergreen Montserrat: A Caribbean Music Retreat That Branches Like a Tree Beneath a Walkable Green Roof

Most cultural campuses begin by clearing the ground. Evergreen Montserrat begins by counting the trees. The proposal treats the island's existing tree population as fixed design material, then lets concert spaces, schools, studios and retreats find room between the trunks. The result reads less like a cluster of buildings and more like a landscape that happens to contain music.

Designed by Aslı Altun and named a Runner-up in Tropical House 2020, the project imagines Montserrat as a destination that rebuilds its cultural identity around international music. The programme is broad: concert spaces, music and dance schools, recording facilities, artist retreats, festival grounds, observation decks, gardens, waterfront connections and public gathering spaces. Altun organises all of it with one stated aim, harmony between architecture and the island's green habitat, and the drawings show how seriously she takes that aim.

A Lower Layer Lit From the Garden Above

The scheme works in two strata. The lower layer holds the functional, cultural and event spaces; the upper layer extends the tropical terrain over them. The ground-level hall makes this relationship legible from inside. A rippled white ceiling is punctured by round skylights, and shafts of daylight fall onto the stone floor in moving pools. The roof is not simply a lid; it behaves like a canopy, filtering light the way foliage would.

The music room shifts the mood. Concrete walls hold a grand piano, and a large window frames pine trees and the sea beyond. Altun does not treat the view as backdrop. The opening is sized and placed so that the landscape becomes part of the room's acoustic and emotional setting, which is a fair description of what a music retreat on an island should offer.

A Dance School That Faces Outward

The axonometric breaks the dance school into its parts: studio, classrooms and garden, each given its own clear position. Below it, interior views show a terrace and a lounge arranged around a curved table. Altun places the school's public areas so they face the landscape and the sea, which keeps a building type that is usually inward-looking connected to everything around it.

This diagram also shows the masterplan logic at a smaller scale. The campus is organised on the ramification of a tree, with functions branching outward instead of lining up along a rigid axis. Each branch keeps its own identity, and the spaces between, including circular gardens, planted courtyards and terraces, are designed as social rooms rather than leftovers.

Roofs You Can Walk, Paths That Lead to the Sea

The upper layer is where the project's argument becomes physical. At dusk, a grass-covered roof cut with oval openings carries two figures toward a low sun over the sea, with trees rising through the surface. Those ovals are the skylights seen from the hall below, so one gesture serves two experiences: light underneath, a sculpted lawn on top. Walkable roofs, planted surfaces and observation points blur any clear line between building and ground.

The aerial view confirms how lightly the complex sits. Terracotta-coloured volumes are scattered among trees and lawn, and wooden paths thread between them toward the shore under a stormy sky. Visitors move through a sequence of gardens, shaded passages, performance areas and framed views rather than from one sealed box to another. Here sustainability stops being a technical checklist and becomes the organising principle of how people experience the site.

Artist Cabins Scaled for Retreat

The festival and the concert hall get the attention, but the retreat cabins may be the most convincing pieces of the scheme. A timber-lined interior holds a sleeping loft reached by ladder, a compact kitchen and a dining table, all lit by low sun through a tall window. The section is efficient and warm, suited to an artist staying for weeks rather than an evening.

These cabins let the campus operate at its smallest scale: individual study and quiet composition alongside large public events. That range, from one musician at a table to a crowd on the lawn, is what makes the branching plan work in practice.

Why This Project Matters

Evergreen Montserrat shows that a large, mixed cultural programme does not have to arrive as a monolith. By splitting the campus into a functional lower layer and a walkable green upper layer, Altun keeps vegetation visually and spatially dominant while still providing halls, studios, schools and housing. The skylit roof that becomes a lawn above is a single idea doing several jobs, and the project is strongest when it relies on moves like that.

For an island looking to rebuild a cultural identity around music, the proposal suggests that the landscape itself can be the institution's brand. Preserved trees, framed sea views and paths that end at the water give visitors reasons to stay that no single venue could supply. It is a confident runner-up, and a useful reference for anyone designing cultural infrastructure in sensitive tropical settings.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Aslı Altun

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Project credits: Evergreen Montserrat by Aslı Altun Tropical House 2020 (uni.xyz).