May 30 – September 7, 2014
Curator: Arch. Susanne Stacher
Parallel to the exhibition “Alps, Architecture, Tourism, demonstrated by the example of South Tyrol”, “Dreamland Alps” will present 22 utopian projections and projects in the Alps.
The relationship between man and nature has thoroughly changed since the Alps were “discovered” in the 18th century, when urban civilization started its ongoing “conquest”. The initial respect and admiration for the grandeur of the alpine world (the “sublime”) gradually made way for unrestrained exploitation by alpine mass tourism and an unlimited marketing of its image, for instance in the form of panoramas and worlds of experience at world exhibitions and amusement parks, such as Dreamland on Coney Island near New York. Architecture reflects this erratic relationship.
Dreamland Alps presents 22 projects from the past 100 years, as examples for Alpine design. Some of them were merely projected, others were built. Many of them thus take on a three-dimensional form for the first time, and sometimes this form is merely based on the free interpretations of visionary drawings by various architects.
The roundelay of utopian and visionary projects reaches from the life-reform colony on Monte Verità (around 1900), the sketches of sanatoriums, hotels, and cable car stations by Henry Jacques Le Même, Adolf Loos, Franz Baumann, Gio Ponti, Charlotte Perriand, and Jean Prouvé, down to Ross Lovegrove’s Biwak-Project (2009).