Projects by Name

Hans Falkner, head of the Ober-Gurgl ski school in the Austrian Tyrol, asked Breuer to design a modern ski lodge. Budgetary limitations combined with the difficulty of transporting materials to the mountainous site led Breuer to avoid steel, glass and concrete. Instead, the three-story building possessed windowless bearing walls crafted from local stone. The remaining walls were recessed planes of wood with ribbon windows. The wood walls were completely self-supporting, as the framing system created a truss whose strength compared favorably with that of reinforced concrete. Breuer originally intended the exterior wooden cladding to have a vertical orientation, but Falkner wanted the building to relate to local building traditions and asked that it run horizontally instead. The lodge featured rooms of various sizes with communal bathrooms and a lounge. The sunbathing areas on the roof terrace were to be separated by sex. Breuer designed the school in 1937 while he was in London but problems with availability of materials and with the building authorities delayed construction. The scheme was put aside after Hans Falkner spent 5 days in jail and was fired from his position due to anti-German sentiment after Germany's annexation of Austria. Falkner eventually came to North America and attempted to start a ski school there. The Architectural Record published the project in 1938, paying for Breuer's students at Harvard to construct a model of the unbuilt lodge. Breuer would use a variation of the wood framing technique he developed here in other projects such as the Hagerty, Fischer, Chamberlain and Weizenblatt Houses.