Avant Apres Ski better integrates the tourist experience with the local conditions to create a functional, harmonious, and navigable experience of the small alpine village of Les Diablerets, Switzerland. A flexible architectural system composed of deconstructed interventions are scattered throughout the site. These interventions, way-finding and place-making mechanisms of varying scale and program, orient users through line-of-sight connections, systematizing pedestrian flow and unifying the landscape’s more extensive infrastructures - grafting itself onto both transportational and recreational nodes. The interventions’ unique architectural language is developed to separate it visually from the vernacular architecture from which it is methodologically derived. They anchor the sight-lines, demarcating zones of activity within which the recreational infrastructure operates. To enable seamless and appropriate interaction between the zones and their edges, the interventions’ sectional image is informed by the programs hosted within them as well as by the spatial qualities of the activity they abut. The edges constitute an integrated path system that both laterally and dynamically ties the site together as a function of explorative and curated experience. The system permits expansion and contraction, flexing to adopt or dismantle seasonal activities or future architectural fixtures as they are instituted or amended. The network and the participation it yields cultivates a learned collective movement that composes a legible, interactive figure - a continual shared event.
Status: School Project
Location: Les Diablerets, CH
My Role: Architect
Additional Credits: Benjamin Ruswick - co-designer