Group 2 of 4
These four have the shortest earlier life of any building in the guide: the ground under them was pasture, ski terrace, harbour yard or open fell a few weeks ago, and will be again by May. The site is permanent. The hotel is not.
Brixen im Thale, Austria
Alpine grazing meadow. For roughly nine months of the year there is grass here and nothing else.
The meadow itself: the village is built directly on snow over pasture, with no foundation and no permanent structure of any kind.
Domes, connecting passages and carved rooms, rebuilt from scratch each winter and melted back into the field each spring.
Cold, quiet and very dark inside the snow. The slope stands above you the whole time and is the only fixed thing in view.
Zermatt, Switzerland
A ski terrace high above the village, in use all day as pisted mountainside and empty by late afternoon.
The terrace and its lift structures. The village is a guest on a piece of ground that has a full working day before anyone checks in.
Snow domes, a bar and a hot tub, assembled each season on the same shelf of mountain.
You go up by lift and stay after the last skier has gone down. Rock and lift towers stay visible above the snow.
Kemi, Finland
Harbour ground at the head of the Bothnian Bay, used for shipping and for the winter icebreaker traffic that Kemi is known for.
The harbour site and its relationship to the sea ice, which is the reason the snow operation was put here at all.
A refrigerated year-round snow structure alongside the seasonal building, so that part of the site no longer melts.
Industrial surroundings, a working port and then a cold hall that behaves the same in July as in January.
Ivalo, Finland
Open fell land in Finnish Lapland: low ground cover, scattered pine, no building history.
The bare ground, which stays visible between the cabins and is the whole reason for the layout — nothing is allowed to block the northern sky.
Separate glass-roofed cabins set apart from one another, and a service building, all placed lightly on the fell.
You are outside more than in. The cabins are spaced so that the sky, not the village, is what you look at.