Project of the Monte Rosa cabin in Wallis by students of ETH Zurich

The ETH Technical School in Zurich and the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) jointly announced on July 5, 2007, that the planned Monte Rosa hut will finally be realized. The project for the mountain hut at the edge of the glacier in the Alpine mountain range was part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of ETH Zurich. At that time, under the guidance of Professor Andrea Deplazes, a “Studio Monte Rosa“ was established at the Institute of Architecture, tasked with designing and building a new hut at an altitude of 2810 meters above sea level. The project aimed to demonstrate that the highest standards of architecture, energy supply, and sustainable development can be combined with construction in alpine conditions. In the studio, composed mainly of architecture students, the design was described as follows: “The key element for the construction of the Monte Rosa hut was autonomy amidst a sensitive landscape in an extreme climate area, far removed from all comfortable civilizational supply networks, in a magnificent isolation ('splendid isolation') between seemingly untamed nature and yet a highly urban culture. These insights will characterize production, site distribution, the establishment of self-sufficient infrastructure, and the subsequent operation of the hut. Only through the synthesis of these contradictory and extreme criteria did the project crystallize in an exemplary manner into this architecturally convincing design.” Construction, costing 5.7 million Swiss francs, will begin next summer and will be completed a year later. Link>