Green Hill: A Walkable Roof Pavilion Designed for Elderly Community Life

What if the building itself were the park? Green Hill proposes a pavilion whose roof is not a boundary but a continuation of the ground plane, a sloped, grass-covered surface that people walk on, sit on, and roll across in wheelchairs. The project treats architecture as landscape infrastructure, merging a multifunctional community centre for elderly residents into a lush green park so thoroughly that the distinction between inside and outside dissolves.

Designed by Александр Сальников and Lena Radchenko, Green Hill was shortlisted in the Huddle competition. The brief called for architecture that fosters gathering and togetherness, and the designers responded with a pavilion whose programme centres on elderly community life: lectures, concerts, workshops, and casual socialising in a café lobby. Nestled among mature trees, the building is calibrated for comfort, clarity of circulation, and visual transparency.

A Roof You Walk On

The aerial view reveals the pavilion's defining move: a sweeping organic roof planted with grass and punctuated by benches and gentle steps. Rather than sitting as an object in the park, the building tucks itself under the landscape, allowing visitors to ascend its surface as a public promenade. The site plan shows how pathways from the surrounding park converge on the pavilion, positioning it as a natural gathering node among existing tree canopies. The curving form avoids hard edges, reading instead as a sculpted hill that happens to contain rooms beneath it.

Glass, Light, and the Circular Hall

At the heart of the pavilion sits a glass-enclosed circular hall that serves as the main auditorium for lectures and concerts. The enclosure draws natural light deep into the interior while maintaining a visual connection to the surrounding park on all sides. Suspended lighting fixtures hang above seated visitors, and a rooftop viewing platform crowns the space, linking the interior programme to the walkable roofscape above. The circularity of the plan is deliberate: it places every visitor equidistant from the centre, reinforcing the social equity the designers sought for elderly users.

Organizing Comfort Below the Slope

The floor plan and section drawing expose the logic hidden beneath the green surface. A central atrium organizes circulation, connecting the café, workshop areas, and the main hall. The section reveals how the sloped roof profile creates varying ceiling heights across the programme, giving intimate scale to the workshop zones while allowing the auditorium to breathe with generous volume. Circulation routes are legible and barrier-free, a priority when designing for older adults who benefit from intuitive wayfinding and uninterrupted sightlines.

Accessibility as Landscape Strategy

The most telling image shows the grass-covered roof in use: children play, adults stroll, and a person in a wheelchair navigates a ramp with ease. The gently sloping surface eliminates the staircase as gatekeeper, making the entire rooftop accessible without segregating users into separate routes. This is inclusivity embedded in the geometry of the building itself, not bolted on as an afterthought. For a project focused on elderly residents, this commitment to universal access gives the design its ethical backbone.

Why This Project Matters

Green Hill works because it refuses to separate the act of building from the act of landscaping. The pavilion does not compete with its park context; it absorbs it. By making the roof a public surface and the walls transparent, the designers collapse the hierarchy between architecture and open space, producing a building that elderly residents can approach, enter, and traverse without encountering the physical or psychological barriers that so much public architecture imposes.

In a competition brief about gathering, Сальников and Radchenko understood that togetherness is not only a programmatic question but a spatial one. The circular hall, the convergent pathways, the walkable roof: each decision nudges people toward one another. For a demographic often underserved by ambitious public architecture, Green Hill argues convincingly that design for the elderly does not mean design that is diminished. It means design that is generous.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Александр Сальников, Lena Radchenko

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Project credits: Green Hill by Александр Сальников, Lena Radchenko Huddle (uni.xyz).