Alpine Glamour, Architectural Boldness

Bathed in sunlight at the heart of the Engadin Valley, St. Moritz has always been more than just a mountain resort: it is a place where legend, extravagance and bold design converge. Its fame as a winter haven can be traced back to a daring wager in 1864, when hotelier Johannes Badrutt invited his English summer guests to return in the cold season, promising they would fall in love with the snowbound landscape or have their travel expenses reimbursed. The guests came, the bet was won and St. Moritz’s reputation as a glamorous Alpine destination was born.

From that moment, the town became a magnet not only for adventurers and society’s elite but also for architects and designers seeking a stage for their creativity. Unlike the quiet, uniform Engadinese villages nearby, St. Moritz dared to embrace eclecticism, blending tradition with fearless innovation. Majestic grand hotels still recall the golden age of ski culture, while bold, experimental buildings re-veal its ongoing role as an expressive playground for architecture. In St. Moritz, style is as much a part of the landscape as the snow-capped peaks: a unique fusion of heritage and novelty that continues to captivate the world.

A few individual works of architecture indeed dot the city and its surroundings, and the curious, alert traveler’s eye might notice them through their profuse peculiarities. Past the Kulm Country Club and Kulm Golf, for example, one can be confronted with a vision from the 1920s, when the resort hosted its first Winter Olympic Games. On this occasion, architect Valentin Koch built a simple yet über-modern structure to be used as a stadium facility, facing a wide, open panorama of the valley.

Now converted into a home by artist Rolf Sachs and maintained in its distinctive red hue, it is one of those buildings reflecting both the history of the city and the creative use their inhabitants make of them. A few steps away and up the Via Maistra, curved in the valley narrowing down to Celerina, proudly stands the pristine structure of the Cresta Run Clubhouse. In a distinctive mix of Modernism and Art Deco, its clean lines provide ample terraces from which to observe the toboggan runs below. Built in 1962 by Italian architect Annibale Fiocchi and although modest in size, the building reflects the ever-tight link binding St. Moritz with sports, just like Koch’s “Stadi-on”, but also with British culture. Indeed, both the Cresta Run and its associated St. Moritz Tobogganing Club (SMTC) were founded by brave Englishmen, who were fond of sledding and created the local and much-riskier take on the sport while also staying at the nearby Kulm Hotel. Incidentally, it was Caspar Badrutt himself who decided on building a dedicated run for his guests, allowing them to enjoy the Valley’s winter activities at their fullest and speediest.

A few other notable names stemming from the galaxy of architecture and design are imprinted in St. Moritz history. The celebrated interior design maestro Renzo Mongiardino completed the whimsical lobby of the Kulm Hotel in 1993, transforming its majestic double-height space with wonderful views over the lake and village into a wonderland of wood intarsia and tapestried columns, in his distinctive maximalist style. In a much more minimal and purist way, contemporary times have seen the erection of another type of buildings, such as the surprisingly late project of an Oscar Niemeyer-designed house on the shores of Lake St. Moritz in 2011, or the bold Ovaverva indoor pool & spa by the Swiss firm Bearth & Deplazes in 2014.

One architect, however, who has had an undeniably unique, lengthy and meaningful relationship with the city is Lord Norman Foster. A renowned icon in the architectural field and beyond, Foster developed a particular fondness for St. Moritz through his own love of skiing and the Alps. Incidentally, it is from the lake that one can observe St. Moritz best, and try to grasp its multifaceted identity. In only a few decades, the location grew from a 19th-century rural village of no more than 500 souls to a full-grown city, still relatively medium in size but assuredly major for its influence in tourism, sports, opulence and architecture. Among Foster’s major works, a few stand out in this historic panorama — most notably the celebrated Chesa Futura, completed in 2004. This striking rounded apartment building, clad in traditional wooden shingles, seems to float amid the classic façades and the nearby leaning church tower. Walking down St. Moritz’s pedestrian zone one can also find the Murezzan, a mixed-use building made of both exclusive retail and living units that shares with the Chesa Futura a curved architecture of wood and glass. Finally, located right in between those two earlier realisations stands Foster’s restoration and extension of the Kulm Country Club with its Eispavillon, a soft, welcoming wooden structure that has since shaped the identity of both the hotel and the city, for it inserts itself in the landscape quite naturally. From here, one can glance at the mountains and forest in the distance beyond the mighty Lake St. Moritz, the Kulm Golf on the left, ice skaters on its esplanade in winter and a jazz concert or paddock of classic cars in summertime. The Kulm Country Club can indeed be seen as the perfect embodiment of what St. Moritz is: an eclectic, dynamic mélange of old and new, with vintage toboggans and bobsleighs hanging from the ceiling of modern, pristine premises that also happen to have a highly enjoyable cocktail bar.

In all of his three St. Moritz projects, Foster demonstrates a deep understanding of the land he builds on, its culture and specificities. Al-though his practice is often associated with the so-called “high-tech” movement, we can definitely grasp a sensibility to the Valley’s own vernacular traditions and architecture through his use of materials as well as his attention to views and contextual landscape. In this sense we may have witnessed, from the architect’s first Engadinese project to the last, the building of a certain kind of modern regionalism that pays respect to the rich land it sits on, all the while experimenting with novelty in style, materiality and engineering practices. This practice, clearly attentive to specific tectonics of construction, reflects the early thoughts of British historian and critic Kenneth Frampton, who exposed in his seminal work Modern Architecture: A Critical History an analytical and contextualised approach, highlighting that modernism is not a linear path to-wards “progress”, but a set of complex currents influenced by various factors such as social and cultural context, materials and construction: an essay that certainly did not escape Norman Foster’s attention.

Considering St. Moritz as a crossroads and meeting place of international significance, we could view the town itself as an “open” place: open to new ideas, open to research, open to experimentation. In fact, St. Moritz emerges as the Engadin city most distinctly devoted to this spirit of inquiry, setting itself apart from its neighbours. While other towns in the Valley preserve different cultural and natural traditions, St. Moritz stands out as a true laboratory of ideas, where tourism, creativity and innovation converge. This unique character not only strengthens its international reputation but also explains why visionary figures such as Norman Foster continue to find fertile ground here for projects that blend heritage, landscape and forward-looking design.

This story first appeared in the book “Begegnungen/Encounters”, published by Kulm Hotel St. Moritz.

Photography: Ralph Feiner; Margit Säde; Inna Alden; Anton Volgger