The philosophy of alpine refuges explained by the architect of the High Lands

Barbara Martino, architect from the Varaita valley, interviews her colleague Jacques-Felix Faure, who today, at 5.30 pm, at Villa Tornaforte-Aragno in Cuneo, will be a guest of the series of meetings dedicated to the mountains and conceived by the publisher Nino Aragno and by director Fredo Valla. Theme: Alpine refuges. Faure conceived, designed and partly built the Nouvelle Cabane de l’Aigle, in the heart of the Parc des Écrins, in the Hautes Alpes, 50 kilometers from Briançon.

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What is special about the Nouvelle Cabane de l’Aigle project?

«The old shelter, built in 1910, was a prefabricated wooden structure, carried up on shoulders piece by piece. For a hundred years it has resisted the assaults of Mother Nature and welcomed generations of mountaineers, including the greatest names in world mountaineering. In 2002, seeing that the state of the Hut was worsening, the Caf of Briançon announced an architectural competition to build a new shelter, demolishing the old one. There was a mobilization of the mountaineering world which allowed for dialogue and mediation, reorienting the project towards an integration between the new and old refuge. We had to take into account some fundamental aspects: the landscape value with a single volume shelter; the value of memory by integrating the old with the new; its symbolic value: the refuge had to remain an “all-in-one refuge”: a single volume in which to eat and sleep. Hence the project for a wooden shell with 30 beds, a kitchen and a room for the caretakers, a technical room and two dry toilets. All this in a surface area of ​​just 65 square metres.”

What other key elements?

«Enhance every cubic centimeter of space, make sure that everything breathes and guarantee an overall vision, transparency, and a view towards the outside. The symbolic space of the large table where we all eat together had to be preserved, with beds where we could sleep with a feeling of privacy. So a reflection on “marrying” wood that over a hundred or more years the hands of mountaineers had “caressed” and “smoothed”. Then address extremely complex issues, for example the strength of the wind which at those altitudes can blow at 250 km per hour, the energy autonomy obtained from the sun, the functioning of the two dry toilets. Finally, the crucial question of a project to be carried out in just three months and in particularly difficult conditions. The assembly of the raw parts on the plain was one of the keys to success.”

What does it mean to design a shelter?

«It means accepting that simplicity is your guide; it means putting the project at the service of the landscape and the mountains. It means putting the light, the sky and the stars in the foreground. For the Cabane de l’Aigle project, for its location, its history, its aura, we had to give an answer that was not obvious. The difficulty lay precisely in the simplicity: almost nothing from an architectural point of view, almost everything from an emotional point of view. A space in which to find oneself in relationship with others… What other places still allow us this? How can we still “live together” in this world of ours, sharing a meal with someone we didn’t know in the morning? We proposed a dense, compact wooden building. However, something was missing that we hadn’t thought about, but which was before our eyes: that is, little Cabane that had withstood the onslaught of all the storms. He was the soul of the refuge; we had to welcome it, committing ourselves to finding a place for it, highlighting it, integrating it into the project”.

You taught in the «Mountain» Master: what values ​​do you transmit to your students:

«First of all I invite them to dream, to be amazed, to be tirelessly curious. I tell them: look, draw, learn. I try to make it clear that technology must not make us forget the values ​​of the project. Meeting/simplicity – density/conviviality – constraint/freedom. I stress the importance of teamwork, collective intelligence, and drawing on what the elders have left us. Personally, I continue to believe in the intelligence of the eye and the hand through the in situ sketches, and in the dialogue with local actors, in the synthesis of the project where the marriage between the present and the new is clearly shown. As if each, old and new, revealed the other.”

You recently built a passive wooden building in Grenoble…

«Yes, with my team, Atelier 17C, we believe that the quality of the project comes from the right material in the right place. This means that the architect must foresee and master the different construction sectors to adapt the project to the territory and context. Today, we must take into account the energy transition and environmental issues, and wood has shown that it can be an excellent answer, especially in regions with high seismicity. But let’s also think about straw and earth. We must be aware of the scarcity of resources and try to work with materials that depend as little as possible on fossil fuels.” —