Situated near the Swiss town of Zermatt – an area that lies below the iconic Matterhorn peak – is a five-story wooden cabin designed by Bearth & Deplazes Architekten.
At the pinnacle of technology and nature, the Monte Rosa Hut sits 2,883 meters high in the Swiss alpine sky between the Gorner, Monte Rosa, and Grenz glaciers near Zermatt. Hours away from the near-est outpost, the structure is rooted into the rocky Monte Rosa Massif mountains. The surrounding landscape has a lunar quality—vast, iso-lated, and eerily quiet. One sees the Matterhorn to the west, dwarfing any sign of human life. Yet the Monte Rosa Hut’s glistening metal and glass walls rise defiantly in the face of endless snow and rock. The hut continues the centuries-old tradition of alpine mountain shelters—while at the same time completely redefining it.
The Month Rosa Hut was inaugurated in 2009 as a research project of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) and Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) who describe the hut as “the most complex wooden construction in Switzerland“.
