Final Frontier for Architecture

Final Frontier for Architecture
Expectation weights heavily on alpine architecture.

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 sub�conscious.

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.

The Murezzan project, masterminded by Giorgio Laurenti, a former New York developer now based partly in St Moritz,