Green Stadium Montpellier: Where Urban Farming Meets the Sports Arena

What if a stadium could feed its city? The Green Stadium Montpellier starts from that provocation, embedding terraced planting beds and urban farming directly into the architecture of a sports venue. Rather than treating landscape as decoration around a concrete bowl, this design makes agriculture structural, threading planted terraces through seating tiers and promenades so that the act of growing food becomes inseparable from the act of gathering for sport.

Designed by Misak Terzibasiyan as a People's Choice contender in Staydium 2020, the project is sited in Montpellier and proposes a stadium that operates as a continuous public landscape rather than a gated enclosure. Its undulating laminated timber roof and open ground plane invite the surrounding neighborhood in, positioning the building as an urban hub with agricultural, recreational, and athletic programs layered into a single form.

A Promenade That Grows Things

The interior promenade is the project's most compelling space. Terraced planting beds step down alongside curved wooden seating, all sheltered beneath a horizontal laminated timber roof that filters light without sealing it out. The effect is closer to a covered market garden than a concourse. Visitors move through productive landscape rather than past it, and the timber structure overhead reinforces the organic continuity between architecture and cultivation.

From above, the undulating roof reads as a topographic landform wrapping a central void. The aerial view reveals how trees punctuate the perimeter, blurring the edge between the stadium's footprint and its surrounding landscape. The central opening keeps the playing field oriented to open sky while the surrounding timber canopy defines a sheltered threshold zone for the agricultural and social programs.

Layering Landscape, Structure, and Roof

A diagram series breaks the design into its constituent layers: landscape at the base, structural framework in the middle, and the flowing roof form on top. Plan and section drawings show how each layer operates independently but locks together to create the building's wavy horizontal profile. The logic is additive rather than monolithic; the stadium is assembled from landscape up, not from enclosure down.

At dusk, the side elevation reveals the cantilevered timber roof extending well beyond the building's base, sheltering the landscaped grounds beneath it. The cantilever is generous enough to define outdoor rooms without walls, creating covered public space that remains permeable to air and views. The horizontal layering of timber members gives the structure a geological quality, as if the roof were a sedimentary formation pressed flat by time.

Public Ground Beneath the Canopy

At ground level, the stadium dissolves into parkland. Visitors walk past planted beds and mature trees, moving freely beneath the laminated timber roof without encountering turnstiles or barriers. The absence of a conventional facade is deliberate: this is a building designed to be entered from any direction, at any time, for reasons that have nothing to do with a scheduled match. The planted beds serve as both landscape infrastructure and food production, reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between sport and agriculture that drives the entire concept.

The Bowl in Section: Seating, Planters, and Trees

Two sectional drawings expose the stadium's bowl-shaped profile. Terraced seating descends toward the pitch in the conventional manner, but flanking trees and integrated planters interrupt the expected uniformity of the grandstand. The sections show how vegetation is not an afterthought applied to the roof but a structural layer woven into the seating tiers themselves. Detail vignettes of people standing and sitting in these planted zones illustrate the intended scale: intimate, walkable, and close enough to the soil to touch it.

The result is a seating bowl that reads more like a terraced hillside than a sports facility. By alternating rows of seats with rows of plants, the design ensures that even on non-match days the stadium has a reason to be occupied. It becomes a productive landscape that happens to contain a pitch, rather than a pitch surrounded by empty seats.

Why This Project Matters

Stadiums are among the most resource-intensive building types, and their utilization rates are notoriously low. Most sit empty for the vast majority of the year, consuming land and energy while contributing little to daily urban life. The Green Stadium Montpellier confronts that inefficiency head on by making the building productive in its idle state. Urban farming, public promenades, and open parkland ensure the structure serves its neighborhood continuously, not just on match days.

Terzibasiyan's proposal is speculative, but its core argument is practical: if a stadium must occupy a significant parcel of urban land, it should give something back every single day. The laminated timber structure, the integrated planting, and the elimination of a hard perimeter all point toward a model where large-scale sports architecture operates as civic infrastructure rather than a periodic spectacle. That shift in expectation, from event venue to productive landscape, is the project's most valuable contribution.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Misak Terzibasiyan

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Project credits: Green Stadium Montpellier by Misak Terzibasiyan Staydium 2020, (uni.xyz).