Touchdown in the snow

The Green Bay Packers are one of the most traditional and successful teams in the National Football League (NFL). Indeed, the team from Wisconsin has won the Super Bowl four times to date. Lambeau Field in Green Bay has been the Packers’ home stadium since 1957. In recent years “Titletown” has been realized directly adjacent to the stadium; it is a leisure complex providing not only restaurants and entertainment, but also numerous sports facilities. “Ariens Hill”, a pavilion with a sledging run, forms the heart of Titletown. For the building’s façade Rossetti, a Detroit-based architecture firm, chose glassfiber-reinforced concrete panels from the “öko skin” series by Austrian manufacturer Rieder.

There is a café on the ground floor of the pavilion and an events room on the top floor. The flat roof merges into a 30-degree slope – an artificial hill that is used for sledging in winter. In the warmer months the green slope can be used as an open-air venue. 

During the planning phase the architects envisioned a frozen mound of earth thrust upwards by tectonic movement. To realize this vision, they clad the façade almost completely in glassfiber panels by Rieder in the “terra” shade. By using all three available surface finishes “ferro”, “ferro light” and “matt”, they created a lively interplay of colors that gives a vivid impression of a towering mound of earth. 

Aside from the sledging run on “Ariens Hill”, there is a large ice-skating rink that extends out in front of the cafe’s floor-level windows. In the summer the rink becomes a spacious terrace. Like the entire “Titletown” project, “Ariens Hill” is intended to be an attractive meeting place for everyone in the city and transform the stadium complex into a popular, all-year-round venue – even though for the time being winter sports are unlikely to oust football as the top sport in Green Bay.