Bernina transversal

A pictorial epos on the spectacular Alpine landscape on Bernina Passintensely used for tourism, energy production, and as transit routeand its infrastructure buildings

The constellation of architecture and landscape inspired Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia to create a visual epos. The result is a unique image of the new read maintenance base near Bernina Pass, designed by renowned Swiss firm Bearth & Deplazes Architekten, in a seemingly arctic winter landscape. Baselgia explored the territory along the road and railway line with his analogue camera. His images also relate the existing infrastructures for traffic and energy production, built in the course of the landscape's industrialization and development since the late 19th century, to the architecture of the new maintenance base.

A concavely curved shield wall topped by a round tower is all that is visible of this vast, purely functional and largely underground space. The shield wall cuts a segment from the topography and thereby encloses a courtyard along with an area of the surrounding landscape. The tower refuses direct encodinguntil entering the camera obscura at its very top, which connects photography, architecture, and landscape to reveal that here it is about insights and not outlooks.

The book features a selection of Guido Baselgia's striking photographs and reproductions of camera obscura images from the tower it outstanding duotone reproduction and documents the Bearth & Deplazes' architecture through concise texts images, and selected plans.

Autorentext

Guido Baselgia lebt in Malans und realisiert als freischaffender Fotograf Projekte in der Schweiz sowie teilweise im Rahmen augedehnter Expeditionen in Europa und Lateinamerika.

Valentin Bearth lehrt als Professor für Entwurf an der Academid di architettura der USI in Mendrisio, Andrea Deplazes als Professor für Architektur und Konstruktion an der ETH Zürich. Gemeinsam führen sie seit 1988 ihr Architekturbüro in Chur.