The holiday home is located in the middle of the village centre of Vnà in the Lower Engadine. Dung sticks and donkeys are part of everyday life, although unfortunately these days are numbered due to the emigration of young people. The special challenge was to manage the balancing act between the still existing originality of the village and today's zeitgeist, which the holiday home of an internationally successful gallery owner contains. The aim was to develop a language that is nourished by the traditional architecture of the Engadine, but is immediately recognisable as contemporary architecture and not conservatively romanticised. In terms of urban development, the construction closed a gap in the village that had been gaping for a long time; the size of the building corresponds to the grain size of the surrounding buildings. The area was repeatedly hit by fires, which caused the wooden houses to disappear and made stone houses typical of the area. With concrete as the main building material, the stony expression of the village was taken into account. Only in the living rooms and bedrooms was panelling made of plywood panels attached to the inside to increase comfort and approximate the traditional attitude to life in a mountain house. The closedness of the ground floor is also often encountered. On a constructive level, the archaic was addressed by the use of aerated concrete, which enables a homogeneous wall structure without layering. The resulting considerable wall thickness comes very close to the character of a traditional construction method and has made the typical slanted reveals of the windows possible. The windows were arranged according to interior criteria, which led to an informal façade appearance, as is typical of the old houses. In the sculptural structure, traditional and modernist elements ultimately merge into a unity.
Source: Andreas Fuhrimann Gabrielle Hächler Architekten
Photos: Valentin Jeck
