High-Altitude Architecture Beyond Constructive Limits: The Fürggen Cableway Arrival Station

The experimentation of technological systems, developed during the 20th century, emancipated the characteristic ingenuity of the professionals of the time, engineers and architects, sometimes challenging the landscape context they were confronted with. High-altitude architecture, although of recent conception, has represented a dilemma in the design debate. Not identifiable with Alpine architecture, but from which it draws its essential aspects (relationship with nature, boundary-space, extreme environment), high-altitude architecture is part of the extensive built heritage of the last century. Of particular artistic relevance, this particular way of ‘making architecture’ fully embraced the ‘sentiment’ of innovation and experimentation initiated at the turn of the century, leading to the birth of architectural masterpieces in an ‘uncontaminated’ place. The arrival station of the Fürggen cableway, designed by the Turinese architect CarloMollino, has become an emblem of modern architecture at high altitudes. The use of traditional materials, such as stone and wood, relate harmoniously with innovative materials for the Alpine environment. The building, constructed on the crest of the mountain like a continuation of it, conceals a pumice concrete skeleton in its inner core according to an all-Italian construction solution: the Eliobeton-Pinottini system. Formulated with perforated pumice concrete blocks and stiffened with steel reinforcement, this system, patented in 1948, has a multifaceted use thanks to its technical and technological characteristics. The objective of the research is the knowledge of the elements that make up the artefact, through a methodological process that systematises all the useful information by means of archive and bibliographic analyses, with the aim of outlining a line of intervention for the conservation of the modern architectural heritage, which is not adequately valued.