(Via Dezeen) You've got to be joking, right? Place a piece of architecture up on the Tyrol Mountains? Only the Europeans would think of something like this. It's beyond madness, it's European.
But that's exactly what Innsbruck-based architects Astearchitecture have done by completing a mountain-top viewing platform above a glacier in Tyrol, Austria. The steel structure, completed last month, cantilevers nine meters over a ridge on Mount Isidor. A trail and its platforms are placed in brittle rock. Its lamellas will disappear in the snow for six month a year. Only the cantilevering bracings over the north wall will be visible in winter time, so these photographs have to be well-timed.
Wind and sun will excavate the steal lamellas nearly like a sketch in the snow. The extreme conditions of the nearby glacier effectuate visual transformations of the steel construction with masks of ice and snow. The steel structure consists of a grillage of beams covered by gratings. The bracings in Corten-Steel cantilever 9 meter over the ridge. The forces are transferred into concrete foundations and rock anchors. The curved monolithic railing is made out of Corten-Steel.
