MOUNTAIN ARCHITECTURE: DESIGNING BETWEEN THE DESIRE TO EXPLORE AND NEED FOR PROTECTION

The beginning of 21(st) century witnesses a recovery of interests on territories and ways of living far from urban and industrialised contexts, for this reason considered marginal and peripheral during the previous century.The aim of this study is to investigate their qualities, and specifically the ones of mountain (somebody could say alpine) architecture: do they have peculiarities? Are there common features between different types and uses? Is it possible to recognize a kind of architecture starting from the place where it has been realised?We tried to answer these questions looking at projects of residential buildings (houses, or holiday houses, colonies, lodges and bivouacs) realised or designed along the Alpine arch during the last century. Their comprehension, developed in several years of didactic works in the Interior Design Studio of the School of Architecture of Politecnico di Milano, has been supported by bibliographical analysis, drafting and realizations of models in a detailed scale. It always tried to keep the connection between detail and general scale, interior spaces and environment.A complex word seems to surround mountain buildings: landscape, that is "an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors", as the European Landscape Convention stated in 2000. Landscape, which is a complex of human works and natural elements having a value of common heritage.Architecture in its outer face, can either recall it, even in unexpected ways (using for instance geometry and materials of crystals and rocks), or transcend it, in a relationship both of dissimilarity and of mimesis.Architecture can recall its natural or human components, discussing through forms an idea of tradition, the skill to read a place and interpret it by buildings, without interrupting the continuous flow of history.Much more than in urban environment, mountain architecture, and especially residential buildings, maintain their role of shelter protecting human life and giving the possibility to dwell in a space. Architecture can thus work on strict evaluation of needs and on study of building techniques to reduce costs and times (for the short duration of building season and to the complexity of building plots), on the relationship desired with the outer world (developing the layout of rooms, studying geometry of spaces, profile of sections and windows: the height of living room of Wright's Fallingwater decrease close to the openings and sofas look inside to give a sense of protection to inhabitants), on quality and form of furniture.Mountain architecture seems to be built on antinomies, due to the tension between desire to explore and need for protection, desire to blend and will to prevail: natural/human, mimesis/dissimilarity, open/closed, wild/protected. They are all caused either by the relationship with the landscape and by the need for protection from a still wild, uncontrolled nature