Hospice, St. Gotthard Pass

Since 1972, all the buildings at the summit of the pass have been owned by a foundation, which has renovated them one by one and made them usable again. It did not recognize the historic value of the Altes Hospiz until later, whereupon it launched a competition to alter and enlarge the building. But how to deal with such an important structure when it no longer meets today’s accommodation requirements, either technically or architecturally? Bearing the tradition of the place in mind, one continues to build in a forceful way. And that is what the winning architects Miller & Maranta of Basel proposed. They made it their goal to clarify and enhance the building's architectural qualities, which meant keeping the shape of the gable and raising it by one storey, hollowing out the house and placing a new wooden structure inside, and capping it off with a big, heavy, lead-covered roof.

Having won the competition, the architects bravely set to work. They gutted the house above the first upper storey and left the interior of the chapel, renovated 25 years ago, unchanged. The two storeys beside it were subdivided in a new way: the ground floor with a small entrance lobby, a utility room and storage; the first floor with common rooms behind the striking, round-arched windows. Above this, everything is new: a concrete stairway with a spacious hallway, to the left and right of which is an inserted wooden structure containing fourteen rooms, all the way up to the roof. Because the Gotthard Pass is open only in the summer half of the year, and construction is only possible during that period, the architects chose a prefabricated structure, namely a wooden framework with horizontal planks. Each room takes up two bays in the grid of beams. All walls, ceilings, floors and furniture are made of unfinished pine. Each room extends between the stairwell and the outer wall, from the door to the window. Two thick supports and a deep ceiling joist mark off the niche for the bed. The metallic glow of the bathroom walls suggests the shimmering landscape outdoors. On the outside, a barely visible seam in the rough limestone render and the windows of the gable elevation hint at the building's latest development phase. Above the restored casement windows of the first two storeys are two rows of new, minimally larger ones with double-glazing but still with a central mullion. At the very top, a large opening with only one pane of glass subtly indicates the suite behind it, which extends all the way to the roof ridge.

The facility is now exactly what is wanted in a place like this: a simple inn, but one that provides the conveniences expected by today's hotel guests. An understated splendour characterizes the new-old hospice; an air of refinement restrained by the harsh mountain climate permeates everything from the old, squat, round-arched windows to the plain furniture designed by the architects. For revitalizing the Altes Hospiz and blending its temporal layers into a new, coherent whole full of atmosphere the architects, the client and the heritage preservation authorities deserve full credit. Such a self-confident treatment of existing structures can by no means be taken for granted. Not even in Switzerland.