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PR09


‘Cliff Hotel’
Laura Rubio
FS21 Final




“We need quiet and wide places to reflect, places with long walks and arcades for bad weather, or when the sun is excessive, places where there is no noise from vehicles or town criers. We need constructions that lead us to understand the importance of the elevation of  isolation.”


Friedrich Nietzsche
Architektur der Erkennenden
Paragraph n.280 de Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.





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This remote alpine mountain, which modern civilization has not yet touched, calls for an architecture with a subtle but unalterable presence, like a temple in the nature. In this project, the intense setting of architecture with the landscape occurs in an absolute way, since the building seems to grow from the ground. Its topography is composed of a plateau on the cliff that descends slightly towards the east side, adjacent to a waterfall, and the magnificent view of the Ortstock mountain.

The project aims to tame and be tamed by this formidable landscape, (from the Latin formidabĭlis, the form that frighten) rocky and leafy, which can only be accessed by walking one hour from Braunwald. The most paradoxical quality of the project is its tendency to urbanity and isolation, inviting the visitor to walk and remain in this extensive space arranged for the silent reflection that Nietzsche speaks.

The project is contained by a wall that physically delimits the space to make this place habitable which can be reached by a succession of platforms connected to each other through wide stairways, which establish a large linear space that never loses the visual reference with Ortstock.

Over this container wall sits an elongated volume that seems to float over the cliff, where remain a wide and open space that awaits for the visitor to rest by the fire, for drinking something warm and just let oneself go by the formidable landscape that the wood construction frames.

At the end of the trace, on the east side, there are two terraces that can almost touch the waterfall, behind them there is an arcade space from which you can access the individual and shared rooms, arranged to welcome the visitor for short periods of time. The rooms are elementally developed and have a nuanced light that comes from above, that together with the rock creates an atmosphere that invites to solitary introspection.

This project allows us to see the realization of nature in architecture, emphasizing the poetic experience of traverse and remain, of visual amplitude and the seclusion of space. The proposal is, above all, an expression of a desire to renew the ways of relating the eternal nature, with the contemporary man.


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