L'architecture et l'innovation qui y est liée ont une grande importance dans le Sud-Tyrol. De plus, c'est une région qui ose beaucoup en matière de construction. En témoignent la distillerie de whisky unique en son genre, la salle d'escalade à la pointe de la technique ou encore le complexe hôtelier exceptionnel. Parfois sans prétention, parfois non, les ouvrages s'intègrent dans le paysage caractéristique du Sud-Tyrol - dans les montagnes ou entre les palmiers et les cyprès. Plusieurs fois récompensées et créées par des architectes locaux, chaque construction vaut le coup d'œil en soi. Découvrez l'interaction actuelle entre le paysage et l'architecture, qui n'existe qu'une seule fois sous cette forme.
The Messner Mountain Museum Ortles in Solda/Sulden is dedicated to ice and glaciers. The exhibition focuses on South Tyrol's most important mountain massif: the Ortler. In collaboration with architect Arnold Gapp, Reinhold Messner has created a unique museum, MMM Ortles is housed in a specially designed new building. The architect from Vinschgau managed to fit most of the museum into a small hill. Uniquely, the entrance was integrated into a natural stone wall and the folded walls of exposed concrete are modelled on ice crystals and ice caves. Inside, visitors can admire the world's largest collection of Ortler mountain paintings and ice tools from two centuries. The light is cast through a jagged band of windows onto the exhibits and will remind guests of a glacial crevasse. Ingeniously, the snow-covered peak of the Ortler mountain can be glimpsed at one point of the museum. The window acts as a picture frame so that the mountain is effectively "hung" in the exhibition.
This pool complex with its sweeping views connects nicely to the surrounding mountain landscape, creating an added attraction for visitors. At first glance the entrance façade looks closed as the result of the masonry curtain on the upper level, but the prominent glazed entrance area and long horizontal bands of windows on the ground floor also allow for a welcoming peek into the pool from outside. Apart from that, floor-to-ceiling glass facades girdle the structure, opening generously onto the outdoor swimming pool and the views. Through a recess in the roof, a shielded roof terrace for the sauna was created on the first floor, which also affords views into the distance. Light-flooded during the daytime, the wooden ceilings inside also lend the spaces a warm light and nice atmosphere when artificially lit at nighttime.
The former Ifinger cable car of the 1960s was replaced in 2010. Construction works lasted a mere ten months and ran between Naif (750 m), near Merano, and the ski resort Merano 2000, at 1960 m above sea level. Two cabins for 120 people now ascend to the mountain station in only six minutes. There the cable car technology, by the company Doppelmayr, is housed in a large cube, a recognizable landmark from afar with its red, light perforated exterior, which seems to sway over the white terraces of the reception area. Few materials are used here − steel, glass and light colored concrete − to create a transparent lightness which optimizes the views of the superb mountain landscape. The valley and mountain stations are multiple award-winning alternatives to the usual technology. They combine technology, functionality and design to create a timeless architectural structure.
If you enjoy holidaying in the Ahrntal valley, then don't miss out on a visit to the highest refuge hut in the Zillertaler Alps. The Schwarzensteinhütte is a first-class look-out point with unforgettable panoramic views to the surrounding mountains, as well as a welcoming resting place after a demanding ascent or a hut to hut hiking trip.
-> 50 sleeping places
-> showers
-> drying room
Together with the pre-existing buildings, summit station of the cable car and pizza pavilion, the new mountain restaurant forms a courtyard situation sheltered from the wind in the very exposed, protected landscape site. The new building, however, crouches down, an elongated single-story building, and appears almost as if part of the site. The architecture goes against the usual style of a mountain hut: a wide, cantilevered platform roof protects the underlying perimetric floor-to-ceiling glass façade, which makes the building appear more transparent and lighter. Familiar materials, though, were used: wood terraces, wood furniture, as well as natural stone masonry for the kitchen and adjoining room area. Three timber-clad cubes divide the otherwise completely open floor plan of the spacious guest area, which feels more like a lounge than a mountain hut.
This mountain hut, located at 2.096m next to the cable station Oberholz in Obereggen, Dolomites, contains a restaurant and is located with direct connection to the ski slope. The cantilevering structure grows out of the hill like a fallen tree with three main branches creating a symbiosis with the landscape. Each of them is facing towards the three most important surrounding mountains: Mendola, Corno Nero and Corno Bianco. At the end of the branches a large glass facade frames the surrounding mountains from the interior of the hut. The sloped roof shape of the glasses takes his inspiration from typical huts in the area, while the branching roof and complex structural interior expresses a new and contemporary interpretation of the classic mountain hut. The interior is defined by a complex curvilinear and visible wood structure that gradually fades into walls and creates so called “pockets” for intimacy. The entire hut is constructed with wood: structural elements and interior in spruce, the facade in larch, furniture in oak - all typical woods from the area.
This unusual house is situated amongst a quite standard new village architecture. It consists of two sections: one constructed from parts of a 300-year-old farmhouse in which the farmer's and architect's family have been living for centuries, and another new building that crouches under the large tree trunks. The idea to live under mounted tree trunks came to the architect when he was a child playing in the woods, and he subsequently made it a reality. The stacked, untreated tree trunks do not hide a dingy living space beneath, but rather glass walls and openings that create an artful play of light when inside. In addition many other materials were used, from rough concrete mixed with glass shards to the extremely shiny stainless steel kitchen. A highly imaginative design here from the architect.
Five outstanding architecture sculptures were designed for the adventurous Alpine Road, which leads through the Timmelsjoch Pass to Austria and is closed in winter. Each of the sculptures represents a theme related to this connecting road. The stations are made up of a chapel of sorts on the Austrian side of the pass with a wide promenade jutting out into “nothing,” a square house for the smugglers, the Pass Museum projecting out in a virtually neck-breaking effect, the two gigantic windows of the “telescope” looking over the mountain landscape, which are held by concrete of different shades, and finally the steel construction Granat, an echo of geological formations, which contains a showroom. These sculptures impressively demonstrate how architecture can add value to its surroundings.
In the industrial area of Glorenza/Glurns, the 13-meter-high cubed Puni Distillery stands out like a kasbah from an alien world − a symbolic landmark. It was the architect's ingenious idea to house all the technical equipment, as well as the sales area, and service rooms inside a brick cube, which was designed according to the system of the old, air-permeable brick walls of a rural barn. The stonework thus has a transparent effect, from the exterior and interior alike, and continues down into the basement, where the sparkling-clean fermenting vat and alembics can be found, a massive vault construction. A convincing uniformity in the choice of materials alludes to the clarity of this distillery’s products – the first to distill whisky in Italy. All the glass-and-steel details have been developed with as much as focus on quality as was the brick construction.
