The Matterhorn / Cervino - the iconic, immutable, and cinematic—is a crucible of “the alpine”: a landscape at once natural and hyperreal, both geological and ideological. This peak, endlessly and perpetually reproduced, becomes a stage where fantasies of purity, power, and spectacle are projected. Its slopes carry the sediment of ideology—where Ruskin’s sublime, Mussolini’s nationalist elevation, and Disney’s commodified wonder converge. This project interrogates and recomposes the choreography of alpine experience, how the mountain is not merely seen but sensed, performed, and controlled. Vision is guided. Movement is framed. The body becomes an instrument tuned to the spectacle. The visitor enters. A step-by-step, point-of-view journey unfolds, comic book-like—each panel revealing structure, detail, and illusion. The building and mountain collapse into one choreographed fiction. The Matterhorn was never just a mountain. It is a monument of control, a vertical ideology, an assembly of illusion.
The Indoor ski hill, “the wall” grows from the 1930s Breuil base station, building upon the inherited infrastructure, making it become a built-in spolium. A choreographed experience of a mountain connects the top (Plan Maison) to the bottom station with a series of cable-tents attached to the chairlift carrier pillars. Potential kinetic energy reservers (avalanches) are managed as the energy is recovered through weight based passive battery systems connected to pulley cannons monitoring the avalanches from the watchtowers. Cable cars are re-lensed, offering a new way of seeing and understanding the mountain and its snow coverage (or the lack thereof). Descent through one of the conditioned slopes cantilevered from the base wall transports the visitor to an artificially natural, idealized landscape while being reminded of the artifice of the idea of a mountain as one rushes through camera - obscura visions of the peak. Interior slope materializes both the physical and the visual phenomena of the alpine.
