Le case di Lois Welzenbacher, dispositivi che reinventano lo spazio alpino
The houses of Lois Welzenbacher, devices that reinvent the Alpine space
DOI:10.30682/aa1903l
Antonio De Rossi
Architect, PhD, full professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Politecnico di Torino and director of the research centre «Istituto di Architettura Montana» (IAM).
Laura Mascino
Laura Mascino, architect and PhD, is professor of Urban Planning at the Politecnico di Milano.
As an exponent of that “Tyrolean” generation of architects that in the Germanspeaking central-eastern Alps will be decisive in the specific declination of the themes of architectural modernity within the mountain context, Lois Welzenbacher realizes, between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, a series of houses and villas that reinvent the relationship between architecture and Alpine environment in completely new and inaugural terms. The Buchroithner house built in 1928-30 in Zell am See, the Rosenbauer house built in 1929-30 in Linz, and the Buchroithner house built in 1932 again in Zell am See establish a new way of relating to the space and to the Alpine landscape: they incorporate the mountain landscape, and at the same time they transform and change in relation to the topographic morphology of the site, giving life to an architecture that builds a relational dialectic with its surroundings in a completely new way. In this respect, the works of Lois Welzenbacher represent a decisive threshold in the conceptualization of the construction in the Alps.
