MIT Site 4 Rooftop Playground by Landworks Studio, Inc.

This rooftop play forest is located on the second floor of a new graduate student housing tower at the heart of MIT’s Kendall Square campus in Cambridge. The project emerged from the 2014 East Campus Gateway Expansion study—an important study that shaped the framework for future campus development. Aligned with MIT’s mission to broaden its educational reach, the playscape invites meaningful interactions between people and landscape.

The tower brings together graduate residences, academic offices, ground-floor retail, and an on-site child-care center, creating a vibrant, multifunctional hub for MIT students and their families. The playground serves the adjacent child-care facility and is carefully integrated into the architecture of the building.

The design team’s primary objective for the child-care terrace was to craft a playful, flexible, and future-ready outdoor environment that supports early childhood development through imaginative play. Rather than embedding specific play equipment directly into the design language or form-making of the space, the team emphasized the creation of a durable, adaptable outdoor room. This approach allows for the integration of off-the-shelf play elements that can be easily replaced, upgraded, or reconfigured over time, ensuring the longevity and continued relevance of the space as needs evolve and new play technologies emerge.

Brightly colored safety surfacing and turf come together to form the ground plane, crafting an undulating forest floor that offers a dynamic canvas for exploration. Recognizing the visibility of the terrace from surrounding academic buildings and student residences, the design team placed a strong emphasis on creating a space that would be visually cohesive, seasonally dynamic, and engaging when viewed from above.

To this end, a carefully curated canopy of Chinese Elms was introduced to provide approximately seventy-five percent shade coverage during daytime hours, enhancing comfort on the terrace while contributing to the microclimate of the roof. The richly layered canopy creates a sense of immersion for users on the terrace while offering a textured, verdant visual experience for those viewing the space from adjacent towers and offices.

Evening use and visibility were also taken into consideration. The terrace lighting strategy employs low-impact, dark-sky-compliant fixtures that minimize light pollution while enhancing safety and creating a warm, welcoming nighttime ambiance that supports use into the evening hours.

A unifying architectural mesh enclosure wraps the perimeter of the terrace, simultaneously providing safety, spatial containment, and design continuity with the building wrapper. Developed as a collaborative element between the architect and landscape architect, the mesh enclosure serves as both a protective barrier and a sculptural frame—tying together all elements of the terrace design into a visually cohesive, materially rich composition. Its transparency offers filtered views out while creating a soft edge that frames the terrace without enclosing it entirely.

Together, these design interventions demonstrate a nuanced and multidisciplinary approach to rooftop landscape architecture—balancing play, aesthetics, flexibility, safety, and environmental performance. The Site 4 terraces provide meaningful open space in a dense urban setting, supporting the day-to-day lives of MIT’s community and reflecting a forward-thinking model for rooftop landscapes in mixed-use, institutional contexts.

• Architecture offices involved in the design:
NADAAA (design architect), Perkins+Will (architect of record)

• Other credits:
Location: Cambridge, MA, USA

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