architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

Taking the world of forms found in the high alpine landscape as a basis, the architects from Vorarlberg designed two new stations of the Wildspitz Cable Car as organic sculptures enveloped in curved aluminum sheet panels. Integrated in the mountain station is "Café 3440,” currently the highest-lying restaurant in Austria, with a freely suspended terrace glazed on all sides, which offers spectacular views into the glacier world.

In 2007 the "Sunna Alm” at the Pitztaler Glacier and Rifflsee ski resort was Europe’s first passive house to be built at an altitude of 2300 metres. Both the inside and outside of the restaurant building are characterised by wood and glass, with which modern tourism and traditional mountain life are connected without slipping into the embarrassing cliché of being rustic. The outside of the building was deliberately finished in larch-wood-shingle as a reference to Josef Lackner’s Rifflsee cable car valley station.

The architectural originality of the Rifflseebahn valley station is typical for Josef Lackner’s (1931 – 2001) work, which he always kept at a distance from fashions and trends. In this case, with the in form and content he played with the theme of regional building, which he took and transformed into new relationships – for example, he took autonomous buildings developed in room and functional programmes and covered them with "old fashioned” wood shingle.