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The Alps have been at the center of a long process of proto-industrial development during the entire modern era up until the late nineteenth century. For many historians, in the second half of the nineteenth century the processes of modernization and expansion of the capitalist economy associated with industrial growth disrupted the historical equilibrium, thus radically altering the relationship between mountains and plains to favor the latter. However, this general interpretation has been critically reviewed in recent years; studies have highlighted that the various Alpine societies have given rise to historical paths that have seen the development of both local and Fordist production models. After World War II, the historical and traditional industrialization of the Alps experienced a crisis that occurred at the same time as the most dramatic demographic decline – which was especially significant in the Western Alps. At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, a series of experiences and phenomena began to take place, opening up to the possibility of a self-sufficient and sustainable Alpine production. In this sense, the sector of mountain agriculture is quite emblematic, as it has been at the center of the current phase of rethinking and regeneration of Alpine territories. Architecture and production in the Alps may effectively interact through the growth of a wood industry aimed at building in the Austrian region of Vorarlberg, which is a particularly relevant issue. In mountain architecture, wood is not used to follow the tradition nor to adhere to a traditional building culture in the mountains, but because this material – as the techniques and savoir-faire needed to work with wood – is the current protagonist of the Alpine production sector. Shifting the point of view by considering the theme of production also allows us to rethink the themes of ecological transition and climate change.

As Daniele Vitale wrote, the elements of historical Alpine tradition seem to be, for Mollino, “pretexts” for an exploration and formal manipulation that seeks its ways and directions. Rural architecture is therefore seen not as the bearer of an “objective rationality”, but as a set of materials that, thanks to the design interpretation, determines unprecedented fields of value. The process that characterizes many of his mountain works rarely follows the linear logic of problem solving but is characterized by a deviation that creates a new value space, a gap that distances it from the outcome considered as a consequential act. Let us think of the device of recovery and distortion of archetypes and conventional configurations of the historical tradition, which become a pretext for reinterpretations that generate new tectonic and formal meanings. Let us consider also their disassembly and reassembly to understand their constructive relationships, static configurations, tectonic logics, which were reused in the creation of his design devices; or the metamorphic and metasemic transmutations of some constructive figures exasperated to the point that, from being part of a whole, they are amplified and hyperbolized until they coincide with the overall architectural configuration. The essay, by retracing some of Carlo Mollino’s numerous projects developed in the Alpine area and some of his main built works, tries to identify some of the conceptual devices employed in his mountain construction site.

The Corpus of historical architecture – built by traditional societies in the Alps be-tween the great settlement phase of the twelfth-thirteenth century and the break caused by twentieth-century modernization – represents one of the main references when addressing the topic of building in the mountains. It is recognized as having authority. It is to it that we appeal – from the nineteenth-century Swiss-German treatises, through Adolf Loos and Giuseppe Pagano, to contemporary designers – to legitimize theories or to support collective images on building in the mountains. The Corpus of historical Alpine architecture, however, consists not only of the materiality of the buildings and infrastructures, but above all of the dense layering of exegesis and interpretations. The essay highlights how in recent years, however, it seems to be set in motion again through actions of a different nature: on the one hand, the weakening of a patrimonial paradigm that only placed the recognition of historical values and the conservation-enhancement of heritage at the center; on the other hand, the emergence of an unprecedented issue related to the construction of a new habitability in the Alps through projects for the revitalization and re-generation of territories based on the need for spaces that provide social interaction to the community, welfare, and culture production. This creates a new demand for the construction of “use values” that goes beyond the historical and symbolic values of heritage; thus, an unprecedented way of looking and thinking about things is required to prefigure a new civilization of the mountain in which legacies return to being a living body.

L’Università, come attività di trasferimento e terza missione, pratica spesso forme di ricerca progettuale applicata in stretto rapporto con enti e comunità locali. Ne sono un esempio Ostana e l’infrastrutturazione di welfare come dispositivo rigenerativo, il caso del Saluzzese e della costruzione strategica del territorio, e le operazioni di rigenerazione e sviluppo di Salemi. I tre casi hanno in comune un’operazione di mediazione socioculturale come pratica di concettualizzazione scientifica.

Throughout the twentieth century, the gazes of observers from different disciplinary fields, ethnologists, geographers, architects have focused on the Alpine rural house. What do scholars seek within the theme of the house and the rural area? In Switzerland, the pioneering nineteenth-century studies were followed by research, starting from the 1870s, by the philologist Jakob Hunziker. In his analysis, he took into consideration not only exceptional constructions but also widespread building production. Buildings were detected and illustrated through diagrammatic – primarily planimetric – and photographic representations. However, the original data in Hunziker’s work is found above all in the correlation that is established between language and architecture. In this context, rural architecture is no longer a simple determinist adhesion to the natural and environmental context in which one lives but becomes a historically determined affirmation of a verified and mediated cultural model concerning the local datum. Alongside the readings of geographers and ethnologists, there is the chapter of the studies on the rural house conducted by architectural culture. The theme of rural architecture will represent a subject of dispute with often ideological overtones between proponents of modernity and those of traditionalism. Towards the mid-thirties, Pagano’s semantic translation represents the definitive shift, at least by the architects of the modernist front, from a mere question of a more complex theme, capable of considering the multiple aspects of building in the countryside, culminating in the exhibition Architettura rurale Italiana by Pagano and Daniel. The use of the category of functionalism when dealing with the farmer house allows to recognize rural architecture as a discipline and simultaneously allows it to function as a cultural background and a historical validation for rationalism.

When compared with the central-eastern ones, the Western Alps have experienced a growing marginality in the new century. After all, getting out of the heavy legacy left by twentieth-century modernisation – abandonment of territories and tourism – is not easy. Today, however, there seems to be some evidence of a radical change in sensitivity, characterised by an awareness of the potential and limits of the contemporary architecture in relation to local dimension. This is how environment, landscape, history, traditions, heritage are no longer just a “fetish” to be exhibited for the mountain users, but become the threads with which contemporaneity tries to mend the ties interrupted with the territories. Quality architecture no longer seems to be just a self-referential exercise of composition, but a conscious opportunity to translate the demands, imaginaries, expectations, identities of the territories, in physical projects. Projects that are within the processes and that necessarily respond to compromises, in which sometimes the aesthetic-formal aspect is only one among all that control the project, that become the result of extremely diversified and contrasting questions. This working condition, always at the edge of the processes, inevitably also affects the forms of architecture, in which the difficulties and precariousness of the operational context become a prerequisite for the characterisation of the figurative and architectural aspects.

"The contemporary architectural production in the Alps of Piedmont has to be studied taking into consideration the contrasting phenomena of depopulation and tourism that have involved the mountain areas of the region during last century. In the fifties and sixties the percentage of abandonment of the high valleys reaches even 80-90%. Entire communities move to industrial urban centers in the cities on the plain. On the other side we witness to a strong polarization of the winter stations that become real “banlieues blanches” for the free time of the citizens and where the architecture of alpine modernism, with various forms, shapes. The paradox nowadays is that the rarefaction of abandoned and depopulated territories is necessary to force to start and choose new innovative paths. We witness a contemporary situation with different shades: on one side the well-established touristic territories that need projects to promote the redevelopment and diversification, on the other side the marginal places where are rising new visions are practices of reactivation of the territory in which architecture is fundamental. The topic of quality of the construction of the physical space intersects with the regeneration of places on a cultural basis, new agriculture and green economy, innovative development of the patrimony, sustainable tourism, with inclusive and participative paths of nature, by giving new meanings to places and building new economies and identities."

"The construction of a renewed habitability of the contemporary Alpine space requires a profound critical revision of the ways of looking and of the cultures concerning the theme of re-use of the built heritage. Over the last few decades, a sort of crystallization of imaginaries, operational practices and development ideas has emerged around the two terms of re-use and heritage and their ways of interaction, which today is likely to be an obstacle to the construction of new development scenarios for the Alpine region. Trying to imagine new values and meanings of the concepts of reuse and heritage, however, requires the questioning of those patrimonialization cultures that have served as the ultimate framework for the project of the Alpine space. The essay reconstructs those design processes that, starting from a renewed productive vision of the mountain, attempt today to overcome a hypostatized vision of the conventional cultural landscape produced by the patrimonialist paradigm, to embrace a transformative attitude of the heritage based on the materic character of the basic elements of the Alpine space. In particular we want to underline how the contemporary design culture in the Alps is directed to the development of synthetic languages aimed at capturing the stratified and diachronic dimension of the built landscape through metasemic cognitive and interpretative practices. It is an attitude that, against a background of the change in perspective brought about by climate change and environmental issues, allows the maximization of the opportunities and physical resources recovered in the place, perfectly in line with the aptitude for the continuous re-use of the Alpine civilizations of the past, which focuses on the awareness of participating in a constructive process of transformation of the long lasting Alpine territory."

"As an exponent of that “Tyrolean” generation of architects that in the Germanspeaking central-eastern Alps will be decisive in the specific declination of the themes of architectural modernity within the mountain context, Lois Welzenbacher realizes, between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, a series of houses and villas that reinvent the relationship between architecture and Alpine environment in completely new and inaugural terms. The Buchroithner house built in 1928-30 in Zell am See, the Rosenbauer house built in 1929-30 in Linz, and the Buchroithner house built in 1932 again in Zell am See establish a new way of relating to the space and to the Alpine landscape: they incorporate the mountain landscape, and at the same time they transform and change in relation to the topographic morphology of the site, giving life to an architecture that builds a relational dialectic with its surroundings in a completely new way. In this respect, the works of Lois Welzenbacher represent a decisive threshold in the conceptualization of the construction in the Alps."

"Why the need, in some way the urgency, of a historically retrospective number of «ArchAlp» magazine dedicated to the houses of Alpine modernity? The intent of this issue is to investigate the relationship between twentieth century modernity and contemporaneity in terms of breaks and novelties, of continuity and discontinuity, of shooting, variations and implementations, not just under the formal and linguistic aspect. In other words, are there points of interaction, long lasting red threads between the architectural vision of Lois Welzenbacher, Charlotte Perriand, Carlo Mollino, and that of Peter Zumthor, Gion A. Caminada, Bernardo Bader? It is basically a way to understand the existence of more or less long trajectories in the way architecture has set the critical and cultural field of mountain construction, recognizing differences and specificities. Although these are generally well-known projects, the works published in this issue of «ArchAlp» are not uniformly known in the territories that refer to the Alpine space. Hence the importance of gathering together a series of architectures that have had the potential for prototypes in order to submit them to a general and comparative view. Even in the absence of perhaps direct subsidiaries, the architectures presented in these pages represent an extraordinary patrimony of design moves and strategies which, through the internalization of experiences, deeply influenced the formation and determination of the contemporary architectural research field in the Alpine environment."

Only less than half a century has passed since the famous book by Nuto Revelli Il mondo dei vinti was published, in 1977. A symbolic work, which summed up with powerful evocative efficacy the dramatic process of depopulation and dissolution of traditional Alpine societies during the twentieth century. A process that centered around the valleys of Carnia, the south-east of France, and especially the Piedmont’s valleys of the Cuneo area, with drop-out rates that would reach as high as 80-90% of the population. A little over forty years have passed by since Revelli’s book was published, and a lot seems to have changed since then. Today many prestigious and successful tourist and winter destinations are experiencing a growing crisis in terms of image and public, whereas the once neglected Valades ousitanes live an unprecedented blooming season, focused on enhancing their trio of natural, historical, and cultural heritage. Maira Valley, Ostana in the Po Valley, Paraloup and Rittana in the Stura Valley, the upper Varaita Valley: rebirth is taking place in all the Occitan valleys, with interesting resettlement processes that were initiated by the so-called «new mountaineers». This renaissance of the Occitan valleys is accompanied by new forms of architecture that focus on the themes of recovery and reuse of their heritage, of dialectical confrontation with environmental and historical contexts, not forgetting contemporary and technological innovation.

"The crisis brought on by Covid-19 has dramatically highlighted how the territorial dimension has long been excluded from national policies, to be reduced to a mere diagrammatic and abstract space. An unphysicality of things that is also conveyed through philosophies of smart or replicable best practices, based on the idea that following a procedure is enough to solve the complexities of contemporary life. The crisis has also brought to light the themes of internal, mountain and marginal areas, which have already received strong and growing attention in recent years. All the research of the last few years demonstrates how the frontier of innovation is to be found in remote areas, in territories such as the Alpine and Apennine ones, in regeneration projects based on culture, community cooperatives, resettlement that arise on the recovery of legacy and on new technologies. These experiments are as fragile as the places they insist on, but there the territorial and spatial dimension plays an active and new role which should be carefully observed, given the new openings it can offer. The essay identifies some issues that arise from a long process of analysis and field experiences, and which combine two strategic issues: on the one hand, the need for policies capable of actively addressing the issue of territories – overcoming the contrast between socio-economic and spatial disciplines – and on the other hand, the project of reactivation and regeneration of mountain and marginal areas."