In Green Bay, Wisconsin, a development next to the city’s football arena has an unexpected architectural feature: a giant, two-story sledding hill that lets you slide from the top of a building all the way down to the ground.
Designed by the architecture firm Rossetti, the hill was created to bring people to Titletown–a development around the Green Bay Packers’ football stadium Lambeau Field–even when the team isn’t playing. That’s a particularly difficult thing to do when half the year the weather is freezing and miserable. “The winter in that part of Wisconsin is pretty brutal,” says Jon Disbrow, the design lead on the project. “Lambeau Field is known as the ‘frozen tundra’ because it’s such a severe place to play football in the winter. We wanted to make sure the 10-acre park was an active place all year round.”
The hill is supported by a two-story building that features a cafe and event space. The resulting structure makes the hill–and the building–look like part of the landscape, with the hill’s plateau forming a green roof for the structure. There’s a hydraulic wall at the top of the hill that can be moved depending on the season–it’s just a wall in winter, but transforms into a bar for the summer months when the space hosts events on the building’s roof.
Sledding closed earlier this month with the arrival of spring. But the hill has a dual purpose: This summer, it’ll be a big grassy hill, perfect for picnics and concerts.