Final frontier for architecture By Edwin Heathcote Published: January 27 2006 15:58 | Last updated: January 27 2006 15:58
Expectation weights heavily on alpine architecture, writes Edwin Heathcote. .... From the homely, if sometimes spartan, timber log cabins used by the earliest skiers to the cuckoo-clock houses developed by later enthusiasts, there is no question that the chalet vernacular is deeply engrained in our winter-sports subconscious. But modernism has made its mark on the slopes, too. And it is these serious and ambitious attempts to move into the avant garde that will determine how ski homes will look in the future. Bruno Taut, one of the progenitors of the modern movement, addressed the design of mountain buildings in 1919 with the radical volume Alpine Architecture, in which he anticipated huge structures of glass and steel inspired by icy peaks. And, while his ideas were never completely realised, other modernists took up where he left off. Marcel Breuer, first a student and then a teacher at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, designed a whole ski settlement at Flaine in France overlooking Mont Blanc. Built in the 1960s and refurbished last year, it is the only ski resort in France to be designated a protected monument. Breuer’s contemporary Charlotte Perriand also spent a huge chunk of her long career attempting to create accessible, low-impact structures for alpine resorts. From her wonderful 1930s experiments with mountain shelters .... Architecture, the medium through which cities, the high points of civilisation are realised, cannot compete with mountains. Perhaps architects have traditionally been frightened of placing buildings in juxtaposition with the results of clashing continents. Instead they’ve left the mountains to the builders of uncontroversial chalets and to dim developers. They seem to be slowly losing their fear. cont'd.... http://news.ft.com/cms/s/90b0d79c-8e6c-11da-ae63-0000779e2340.html _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
