Mountain huts
Shelter, sights and service.
When trekking for multiple days in the mountains the only connection one has to humanity are fellow hikers, the rare sights of villages nestled in valleys far away and man-made mountain huts waiting at the end of each day. With villages in the distance acting as a reminder of a civilization still existing somewhere the mountain hut provides a different kind of experience. It sits by itself, embedded in the landscape. With seemingly no connection to the bustling world in the cities lying below its design does not answer to adjacent buildings or urban planning legislations. It only answers to the forces of nature it has to withstand.
Shelter
Withstanding the forces of nature and providing shelter has always been the primary function of mountain huts. Originally built by forest workers, shepherds and the like to find refuge from thunderstorms in remote locations, similar huts were built as shelters for the pilgrimage and along trade routes in the Roman era and throughout the Middle Ages. Only later they were built by mountaineers functioning as base stations on their expeditions to ever higher summits. These types of huts are in use till today. Also known as bivouacs they can be found in mountain ranges around the world, the Alps being the most covered area as mountain huts have a tradition here since the Roman alpine crossings. With spartan interiors and little to no connection to the outdoors bivouacs provide a place to find refuge and stay for the night. Hikers bring their own equipment and often find only the most basic facilities, if any.
The Schutzhuette am Fichtelberg by AFF Architekten, at first sight, falls into this category. With little to no connection to the outdoors it is a spartan shelter for four to six hikers in the Erzgebirge in Germany, close to the Czech border.
Built alongside a road leaving the small village of Tellerhäuser in the Erzgebirge forest the concrete structure has more similarities with a bunker than a mountain hut. This is not your typical mountain hut made out of logs and crowned by a pitched roof. A recessed entryway, a small cove (that looks like a loophole from afar) and shutters for a storage room are the only visible openings in the concrete exterior. Inside, the rough appearance continues. Concrete walls and ceilings, visible installations of the water pipes and electricity cables, serving recycled basins and lamps, are only countered by the warmth of the spruce flooring. But the spruce flooring isn’t the only trigger of a warm and homely feeling. Examining the concrete walls imprints of window frames and wooden siding stick out from the otherwise even surface. When constructing the hut AFF Architekten used what they found on site - an old hut previously used as a storage room by a local ski club and later left to decay. By using the old exterior walls as formwork for the new concrete walls the previous hut is not lost. The old, homely cabin shapes the new hut, its traces can still be found in its successor.
What sets the Schutzhuette apart from other bivouacs is its duality. As closed as it is to the street as open it is towards the forest behind the hut. With large windows facing the forest it differs from huts located in rough mountain terrain which, in contrast to the duality found at the Schutzhuette, form a unity. Facing severe weather and strong winds these shelters are closed off in all directions to withstand nature. By being open towards the forest and closed towards the street the Schutzhuette produces the illusion of being set inside the forest. It does not only keep the forces of nature outside but also the traces of humanity, driving by to get to their holiday homes. So apart from providing shelter the Schutzhuette am Fichtelberg has one more important function: framing sights.
Sights
As the forces of nature are a key driver of a huts design it is traditionally limited in its openings. Doors and windows are kept to a minimum as each opening is a weak spot in the otherwise solid facades. The few loophole-like openings that remain are often protected by folding shutters to keep out the rain and snow, driven in by harsh winds. Without large panorama windows traditional huts merely provide selected views of the outdoors. These confined sights of the outdoors reinforce the feeling of being sheltered from the same.
However, with mountain tourism on the rise one does not want to be separated from the outdoors anymore. Being one with nature is what hikers these days wish for. Technological advancements allow for larger window openings and therefore a virtual dissolution of the barrier between inside and outside. With the Swiss and Slovenian Alpine Associations launching ambitious projects in the last years, self-supported huts like the On Mountain Hut Cabin or the Skuta Alpine Shelter make use of these new technologies by adding lavish glass facades, providing panoramic views of the surrounding mountains. Using only helicopters to get the building components on site the designers had to develop these projects with simplicity and the principles of prefabrication in mind. Even though the triple-glazed glass panels used in these projects are heavy and have to be handled with utmost precision at an altitude of up to 2.500 m above sea level the architects decided to stick with the glass facades, making the sights of the mountains a key feature of the huts design.
Service
Hikers using their summer vacation to explore the mountains and wind down in nature on a multi-day hiking trip often times seek more comfort than bivouacs and self-supported huts can offer. Serviced huts providing rooms with half-board are essentially fully equipped guesthouses up in the mountains and have little to do with the mountain huts erected by travelers in the Roman and Middle Ages.
Depending on the huts location the amenities differ vastly. Huts located in accessible areas, reachable by car and within a few hours of hiking provide a full hotel and restaurant experience, while huts which lie in more remote locations often offer a reduced service as their supplies are delivered only by good cable lift or helicopter, making it expensive to offer a broad variety of goods.
A well-covered example of a hut built in such a remote location is the New Monte-Rosa-Hut in the Monte Rosa massif in Switzerland. Located 2.883 m above sea level it serves as a base camp for mountaineers on their way to the Dufourspitze, the highest mountain in Switzerland. Developed by Studio Monte Rosa at ETH Zurich in cooperation with Bearth & Deplazes it is in service since 2010, replacing the old Monte-Rosa-Hut.
Often described as a mountain crystal the hut, housing 120 mountaineers every night during summer, is almost completely self supported in terms of energy, fresh water and waste water treatment. The shape of the building is in part owed towards its orientation to the sun, using photovoltaics which cover 90 percent of the huts energy demand. Meltwater is gathered to provide fresh water throughout the summer. Bearth & Deplazes describe the hut as an “ambivalence of being exposed and being comforted” Sitting in the restaurant on the ground floor with its large windows one can enjoy the panoramic view of the Monte Rosa massif. Lying in bed in the sleeping quarters upstairs the small windows placed high up in the room evoke the feeling of staying in a cavern. With the mixture of comfort and exposure the New Monte-Rosa-Hut stays true to the tradition of mountain huts by providing shelter and framing sights.
Further reading
…or in this case: further watching. A lecture by Professor Andrea Deplazes on the New Monte-Rosa-Hut and the challenges of building in the mountains can be found here. The lecture was held in German, though the automatically translated subtitles seem to work well.