Modulverantwortung: Prof. Peter Althaus
Lehrteam: Prof. Dr. Oliver Dufner, Dr. Marcel Bächtiger, Felix Wettstein
Assistants: Tobias Furter, Qendrim Gashi

Discovering touristic landscapes
A Road trip from the Savoye Alps to the Mediterrenian Sea

Since the advent of tourism, travel experiences and stays in culturally or scenically significant locations have served as a counterpoint to everyday life for many people. Depending on the individual, a stay in these dream destinations provides either distraction or a sense of purpose. Alongside nature, the architecture itself forms an essential element of this experience. Following this logic, our journey takes us south from Lucerne as a road trip by bus, through the French Alps to the Mediterranean coast; always in the footsteps of tourist architecture of diverse cultural logics and styles. Thus, the hotels and apartment buildings from the 1960s in places like Avoriaz or Les Arcs, as well as the Marina Baie des Anges near Nice, represent a large-scale holiday culture and architecture whose typology and language clearly show an affinity with the modernist housing developments on the urban periphery. Historic religious buildings such as the Cistercian monastery in Le Thoronet or the Grotte Sanctuaire de la Saint-Baume remain pilgrimage sites to this day, offering at least a temporary escape from the real world. Organic buildings like Antti Lovag’s Maison Bernhard or Jacques Couelle’s „Architecture-Sculpture“ housing estates demonstrate a spatial liberation from the dogmas of rationalist architectural production, while Le Corbusier’s Cabanon Roquebrune, within the narrative of modern architecture, exemplifies the retreat of the „noble savage“ and thus stands as an emblem of the antithesis to urban life.