Mountain Modernism: architecture in the American ski towns

About Mountain Modernism: architecture in the American ski towns

By the ULTIMATE Ski Resorts Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

The American ski town has its own architecture. Some grew from silver and gold mining camps whose brick streets now stand protected; others were invented from scratch, by a railway in Idaho or a Bauhaus designer in Colorado; and the newest buildings are by architects of world fame. Here is where to find mountain modernism in the West, and how to see it between ski days.

Sun Valley: where the destination resort began

Sun Valley was built from nothing by the Union Pacific railroad: construction began in May 1936 on a former ranch in Idaho, and the Sun Valley Lodge opened that December. The resort calls itself the birthplace of the modern chairlift, with its first lifts built on Dollar and Proctor mountains that same year, and the Austrian-chalet Sun Valley Inn followed in 1937. The Lodge, with its spa and glass-enclosed pool, is still the resort’s flagship.

Aspen: Bauhaus in the Rockies

Aspen’s modern story begins with Herbert Bayer, the Austrian-born artist and designer trained at the Bauhaus. On the campus of the Aspen Institute in the West End, he made the Marble Garden and the Grass Mound in 1955, often called the first earthworks of contemporary art; the Marble Garden, built from discarded blocks from a quarry near the town of Marble, was restored and won a national preservation citation in 2024. Stay on the campus at the Aspen Meadows Resort, or walk the grounds and visit the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies.

In the American West, the mining town and the modernist campus sit at the foot of the same mountains.

Downtown, the Aspen Art Museum is Shigeru Ban’s first permanent museum in the United States. Completed in the summer of 2014, it is wrapped in a woven screen of a paper-and-resin composite with a wood veneer, and inside a moving glass room carries visitors between floors, and a grand stair, mirrored inside and out, climbs beside it. There is no admission charge.

Telluride: a mining town preserved

At the end of a box canyon in the San Juan Mountains, Telluride’s core was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1961, at a time when it was the only Colorado mining town to have worked as such since 1876. Its brick and timber streets are a 19th-century boom town in miniature; the New Sheridan Hotel has stood on Main Street since 1895. A gondola links the town with Mountain Village above.

Park City: silver and film

Park City’s Historic Main Street is a silver-boom street of saloons, galleries and independent shops at the foot of the Town Lift. For four decades it was also the home of the Sundance Film Festival; the Sundance Institute has announced that the festival moves to Boulder, Colorado, from 2027, so January in Park City will be quieter.

Palisades Tahoe: the Olympic valley

Palisades Tahoe, then called Squaw Valley, hosted the Olympic Winter Games of 1960. Ride the Aerial Tram to High Camp, with its views over Lake Tahoe, for the Olympic Museum and its memorabilia of those Games.

Jackson Hole: Big Red

Jackson Hole’s Aerial Tram is a piece of engineering history. The first tram carried skiers up Rendezvous Mountain for 40 years; its successor, the red, 100-person Big Red, opened in December 2008 and rises 4,139 vertical feet in about nine minutes. Below, Amangani’s redwood and sandstone retreat on East Gros Ventre Butte shows how far mountain modernism has travelled in the valley.

Our advice: plan Aspen around a morning at the Art Museum and an afternoon on the Institute campus; walk Telluride’s and Park City’s historic streets at dusk; and take the trams for the views as well as the skiing. Then cross the Atlantic for the Alps’ granaries, glacier stations and Charlotte Perriand’s Les Arcs.

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