Neue Monte Rosa Hütte

An extraordinary task requires extraordinary preparation. The architectural students and faculty of Zurich’s ETH spent 6 years designing the Monte Rosa mountain shelter, 2883 metres up in the Swiss Alps.

At that altitude there are no roads and the summer is short, so the parts of the building had to be helicoptered in and there was barely two moths available for site work.

The 120 bed building, with 18 dormitories has to be made to function without an external electricity supply, water or sewage utilities. The result is one of the world’s most up-to-date autonomous buildings: it is supplied entirely by solar panels, water is stored in a tank which is topped up with snow once a year and waste water is cleaned and recycled. Apart from food supplies only gas for cooking needs to be replaced from external sources.