Alpine Huts - Built Elements in the Landscape: Relationship between Architecture, Nature and Sustainability in a High-altitude Mountain

Alpine huts are territorial outposts built in remote high-altitude locations as a support to exploring and experiencing wild spaces. Due to the location in isolated and hardly accessible sites and the dialogue between built artifacts and fragile nature contexts, relevant design issues often emerge. As the value of the landscape and the importance of its perception are currently recognised on a European level, preserving mountain huts become relevant to support conservation, management and planning of the Alpine space. Therefore, retrofitting and adaptation of these outposts require not only structural reinforcement, spatial renovation and increasing energy efficiency but also dealing with the site environment and landscape. The aim of the contribution is to understand how the above aspects are currently being addressed jointly in the design approach, identifying how environmental sustainability is interpreted. Starting from the study of guidelines for alpine huts, the contribution examines its application to settlement, technological, constructive and resource management choices of some recently built high-altitude architectures. The investigation highlights recurring aspects and current trends in constructing human outposts in remote context identifying different strategies that can be adopted to deliver architectural projects that merge environmental sustainability with a landscape protection. Use of dry construction systems, new materials and resources self-sufficiency are some investigated issues also considering climate change consequences. Today huts are pioneers of technological improvement, where innovative solutions are experimented in complex context. Simultaneously, the research examines the contribution of these strategies in delivering balanced relationship between Man and landscape.