Kuban Cossacks Choir Concert Complex: A Walkable Green Hill for Music in Central Krasnodar

Most concert halls ask the city to stop at their doors. The Kuban Cossacks Choir Concert Complex asks the city to keep walking, up a planted slope and across a terraced roof until the building disappears underfoot and only the view remains. The proposal treats music and theater as reflections of life itself: they can praise the worker, honor the warrior, carry fear, comfort the mind and open a door to abstraction. Its architecture follows that logic. The building offers a pause in a city dominated by traffic, routine and work, and it uses landscape rather than monument to deliver that pause.

Designed by Sasha Pokidova and Анна Степанова, the project was shortlisted in Public Architecture '20. The site sits in the historical, cultural and public center of Krasnodar, close to Theater Square, Haymarket and Catherine Cathedral. Rather than adding another freestanding cultural object to that cluster, the designers propose a lifted terrain of roof gardens, amphitheater areas and performance zones that stitches the choir's home into the city's existing civic network.

A Central Lobby That Gathers Two Halls

Beneath the green surface, the plans are disciplined. The main and second floor drawings organize curved auditorium seating, stage blocks and a smaller hall around a central lobby, with service rooms wrapping the perimeter. The lobby works as the hinge of the scheme: it collects audiences arriving from the street and distributes them toward performances of different scales, while the support spaces pushed to the edges keep the public core legible.

That clarity matters because the roof above is deliberately informal. A building that invites people to wander its top surface needs an interior that does not ask them to wander. The plan supplies that counterweight, letting the ticketed experience run efficiently while the landscape handles the looser, everyday life of the site.

A Constructed Hill Among Brick and Plaster

The elevation is the most persuasive drawing in the set. A terraced, green-roofed theater mass rises behind older brick and plaster street facades, framed by a night sky and a full moon. The new building does not compete with its neighbors through height or material display. It reads as a slope, closer to topography than to a cultural block, which softens its scale within a dense historic center.

The designers describe the roofscape as sloping and farm-like, and the image supports that ambition. The old street wall stays intact in the foreground while the hill climbs behind it, so the city's historic character remains the face of the street and the complex becomes its backdrop. For a public building in a sensitive center, that is a confident and generous position.

Terraces That Turn the Section Into a Route

The cross-section shows how the idea holds together structurally and spatially. The sloped amphitheater and stage tower sit inside the mass, and their geometry shapes the green roof terraces above. The rake of the seating effectively becomes the rake of the landscape, so the act of climbing the roof echoes the act of sitting in the hall. The accompanying site plan extends those planted terraces outward, reinforcing the reading of a continuous garden rather than a building with a roof garden attached.

These year-round green roofs carry several jobs at once: viewing platforms, recreational areas, walking paths, exhibition zones and spaces for informal gathering. Each level opens a new view of Krasnodar and of the building itself, which turns the ascent into a slow narrative. Winding paths and small resting spaces encourage visitors to move slowly and occupy the complex outside scheduled performances, making it a daily civic landscape instead of an evening-only destination.

Domes and Curves Tested by Hand

The process sketches reveal how the form was found. Marker studies of domed and rounded volumes in black and rust red sit beside three small white-line studies on grey cards. The rust red is a telling choice, tying the early massing back to the brick of the surrounding streets, while the repeated domes suggest the designers were searching for a figure soft enough to read as landscape yet strong enough to read as a civic landmark.

Including this material is worthwhile. It shows the hill was not a default gesture but the outcome of iteration, with the rounded forms gradually flattening into the terraced profile that appears in the elevation and section.

Why This Project Matters

Public cultural buildings are often judged by how much attention they draw. This proposal measures success differently: by how much public ground it gives back. By folding a concert complex for the Kuban Cossacks Choir beneath a walkable green roof, Pokidova and Степанова make the institution available to pedestrians, tourists, performers and casual wanderers, not only ticket holders. The building extends the cultural rhythm of Theater Square and its neighbors rather than interrupting it.

The project also offers a useful model for inserting large programmes into historic centers. Letting the auditorium geometry generate the landscape, keeping the old street wall in front and using greenery as occupiable terrain rather than decoration produces a building that respects its context while creating something the city lacked: a quiet, elevated garden where Krasnodar can step out of its routine and listen.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Sasha Pokidova, Анна Степанова

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Project credits: Kuban Cossacks Choir Concert Complex by Sasha Pokidova, Анна Степанова Public Architecture '20 (uni.xyz).