Alpine Design: the architecture of the European ski resorts

About Alpine Design: the architecture of the European ski resorts

By the ULTIMATE Ski Resorts Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Ski resorts are judged by their snow, but the best of them are also places of real architecture. In the Alps, centuries-old timber barns stand a few streets from cableways engineered for the highest stations in Europe, and some of the great architects of our time, from Zaha Hadid to Norman Foster, have built for the mountains. Here is where to look up between runs.

Zermatt: old granaries and a crystal ride

Begin in the car-free village of Zermatt, in the old quarter of the Hinterdorf. More than 30 traditional barns, stores and stables, built between the 16th and 18th centuries, stand on wooden stilts topped with flat stone slabs that kept the mice from the grain. They are built of larch, whose resin protects the timber; in the middle of the village, fifteen owners joined forces in 1853 to build the largest granary in the Upper Valais.

High above, the same village has one of the most advanced cableways in the world. The Matterhorn Glacier Ride, the world’s highest tri-cable 3S cableway, opened in 2018 from Trockener Steg to the Klein Matterhorn; four of its 25 cabins are decorated with crystals, and the ride takes about nine minutes. In July 2023 a second 3S line down to Testa Grigia completed the Matterhorn Alpine Crossing, so you can now travel by cable car between Zermatt and Cervinia in Italy.

In the Alps, the oldest buildings and the newest are answering the same question: how to live well with snow.

St. Moritz: a house of the future

In St. Moritz, Foster + Partners completed the Chesa Futura in 2004. Its name is Romansh for “house of the future”, and its rounded timber form is clad in larch shingles, a traditional Alpine material, cut from local trees and nailed on by hand. It is a private apartment building, so admire it from the street.

Innsbruck: Zaha Hadid’s glacier stations

If you fly into Innsbruck, the Tyrolean capital, give yourself an hour for the Hungerburgbahn. Zaha Hadid designed its four stations, Congress, Löwenhaus, Alpenzoo and Hungerburg, as flowing shells of glass that seem to have been shaped by ice. The funicular opened in December 2007 and climbs from the old town to Hungerburg in about eight minutes, from where the Nordkette cable cars continue up the mountain.

Kronplatz: museums in the summit

In South Tyrol, at 2,275 metres on the summit of Kronplatz above Bruneck, Zaha Hadid Architects carved the Messner Mountain Museum Corones into the mountain itself. The sixth and last of the museums founded by the mountaineer Reinhold Messner, it is devoted to the great walls of the world, and its concrete galleries open in great windows onto the Dolomites. On the same summit, LUMEN, a museum of mountain photography, opened in 2018 in a former cable-car station. The summit is reached by gondola; check each museum’s opening season before you go, and plan a half-day off the slopes.

Les Arcs: Charlotte Perriand’s mountain

Les Arcs in the Savoie is the great modernist ski resort. For more than twenty years from the late 1960s, the architect and designer Charlotte Perriand worked on the creation of Arc 1600 and Arc 1800, planning and fitting out more than 4,500 apartments. Her buildings are designed from the inside out, compact and functional, with large glass façades that open each flat to the mountains. The resort runs guided architecture tours in summer.

Our advice: most of these buildings are public: a lift ticket, a museum entry or a funicular ride is all you need, so plan one design stop into each ski trip. Go in good light, when the snow sets off the timber and glass. Then cross the Atlantic to the mountain towns of the American West.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Alpine Design: the architecture of the European ski resorts before you go.