Overseas Oasis: A Sloped Green Roof That Lets the Park Climb Onto a Community Center

Most community centers ask you to walk through a door before anything happens. This one lets you walk up its roof first. A lawn tilts off the ground plane, rises past the glazed floors and stops at a planted tower. The building becomes a hill you can sit on before it becomes a place you enter. For newcomers to a city, that difference matters: the threshold is grass, not a reception desk.

Overseas Oasis is a community center in Amsterdam, Netherlands, designed by Magdalena Michalak. The project received Editor's Choice at Overseas Oasis 2020. Michalak describes the aim as "a landmark, fulfilled into surrounding," and the scheme commits to that idea: it is a building where students from abroad can overlap with local residents and find gateways into the community around them.

A Quiet Mesh Block Facing the Street

From the street the building does not shout. A single veil of expanded metal mesh wraps the volumes, softening the window grid behind it and letting the mass read as one calm object among its neighbours. The ground floor breaks the pattern with a band of glazing, so the most public level is also the most transparent. Above, the roof edge cuts a diagonal across the facade, the first hint that something unusual happens on top.

The elevations show how disciplined this skin is. Regular openings repeat across four upper floors, while the mesh carries straight over the sloping roof, turning what could have been a clumsy junction between box and ramp into one continuous surface. A green triangle of planted roof shows through at the top, a small reveal that rewards anyone who studies the building closely.

The Park Keeps Going, Straight Up the Roof

The real face of the project turns toward the park. Here the sloped green roof starts at ground level and climbs as a continuous lawn, with figures drawn sitting and walking on it. Michalak names this sloped roof as the defining feature of the center, and the view from the park shows why: it reads less as a roof than as more park, lifted. A glazed stack of floors sits at the top of the slope, and beside it a tower clad in vertical planting closes the composition.

At the foot of the green wall, loose seating spreads across a forecourt. The arrangement is generous in a simple way: you can use this building without going inside it. That is a clever answer for a program meant to bring two groups together, because shared outdoor ground asks nothing of either group beyond showing up.

A Courtyard That Becomes a Stage on Demand

The section through the sloping wing shows the roof doing double duty: rooms step down beneath the incline, and the building continues below grade to a parking level. Next to this, Michalak introduces a mobile stagebox, low modules wrapped in the same expanded metal mesh as the facade. The drawings explain the logic plainly: the boxes connect into a stage or catwalk when an event needs one, and the rest of the time the courtyard works as a square.

This is the right instinct. A permanent stage would claim the courtyard full time for occasional performances. Modular pieces keep the ground open and let the community choose the shape of each gathering, whether a piano recital, as drawn in the courtyard view, or nothing at all.

Meeting Rooms You Can Push Across the Floor

The same strategy carries indoors. The top level holds mobile meeting boxes, mesh-walled cubes on a frame that can be moved around an open floor. The panel text states the goal directly: a layout tailored to students' needs, and so the rooms are mobile. The interior view shows one box set in a bright double-height space, half private room, half piece of furniture.

Reusing the facade mesh at furniture scale gives the project a consistent material language from city block down to table. It also says something about how the building expects to be used: plans will shift as people arrive and leave, and the architecture should give way rather than resist. The cross section and garden elevation in the same panel show the green wall and planted slope framing this activity, so the interior never fully loses sight of the landscape.

Why This Project Matters

Community centers for newcomers often treat integration as a program problem: add rooms, add activities, hope people come. Overseas Oasis treats it as a ground problem. By extending the park up its roof and leaving the courtyard as an open square, the project creates places where locals and students from abroad can share space without an invitation or an agenda. The building earns its landmark status by being climbable, not by being loud.

The mobile boxes push the same idea further inside. One material, expanded metal mesh, runs from facade to stage to meeting room, and every movable piece keeps the floor available for whatever the community needs next. It is a reminder that the most hospitable architecture often sets up the conditions and then steps back, letting the people it serves complete it.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Magdalena Michalak

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Overseas Oasis 2020

Location

Amsterdam, Netherlands

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