The competition project’s main strategic choice revolves around the desire to architecturally embody the very essence of the idea of a refuge: that of a place, mental even before physical, where one can find shelter and protection from the often challenging conditions of the high mountains. A place where one can feel safe, find a hot meal, and rest before returning to face the strenuous challenges of the peaks. In short, what, even in everyday language, is the image of a roof over one’s head.
This is where the proposal invests its full representative character: designed in the elementary section of a sloping roof, a large suspended roof is placed close to the slope, creating a lightweight envelope that preserves a space below, ideal for escaping heavy rain, persistent snow, the relentless summer sun, and the lashing winds.
In fact, the project ideally constitutes a large, “defensive” canopy against the hostile environment and a “protective” one for people, whom it beckons with an inclusive and enveloping attitude, communicating even from afar. The gabled roof is conceived as a unified and uninterrupted compositional device, with the ridge line running approximately along the north-south axis, similar to the architectural structure of the mountain hut, located nearby but at a slightly higher altitude.
In this way, the mountain hut and the refuge establish a dialectical relationship perhaps never so direct; a long-distance symbiotic link that connects them visually, formally, proportionally, and even functionally.
The shared relationship with the mountain hut, almost touching in its rigorous simplicity, does not end there. Indeed, the new refuge building adopts not only its orientation and linear development, but also its partial location within the slope descending to the valley. Just as the mountain hut is “embedded” in the mountain and emerges entirely from it with only its western facade, so too is the new refuge, which positions its living “volume” on the eastern edge of the development area, thus gaining direct protection from the slope into which it is embedded.
