The view from a mountain top

Yeah, I know, it's been a while since the previous post. I can come up with a whole bunch of excuses, but I won't. It will sound lame anyway. The most important thing is: here's a new post.

It might seem pretty easy to make a beautiful piece of architecture in amazing surroundings. The location might already be so fabulous that one might suppose there's nothing much to it to make something stunning. Well, the truth is: it's not like that. It's actually much harder to make something really good, simply because you are adding to a site that was good before you did your thing there. You need to measure up to the site, but still be respectable to the amazing qualities of it.

Therefore, a mountain-viewing platform in the Alps is pretty much a difficult task for any architect. It's not a complex program or anything, and structurally it might prove to have some challenges, but the real difficulty is in the fact that any not quite fitting piece of architecture might appear to be competing against the site itself.


And that is one of the reasons that I enjoy this viewing platform in the Tyrolian Alps (in Austria) so much. The designers, astearchitecture, found a way to add to the landscape. The structure holds middle ground between a piece of landscape and construction. Its platform cantilevers about 9 metres off a ridge of the Stubai Glacier, at about 3200m height.
The structure adds a subtle new dimension to the scenery, but it is not screaming too loudly about it's presence. The platform fits subtly into the surroundings, and adds an extra experience to it. I think this is a great job in synthesising landscape and construction


I found this gem on dezeen.com.