ABSTRACT
The mountain refuges (Alpenvereinshutten) in the Eastern Alps, built by the German and Austrian Alpine Association since the 1880s, are characterised by bourgeois traditionalism and extreme environmental conditions. Their construction sites are marked by difficult circumstances for the building process and the organisation of work. This chapter analyses mountain refuges that were built between 1870 and 2006. All of them are of the same type, one that was developed in the late nineteenth century. This category of buildings is marked by a characteristic ambivalence between traditional and innovative construction. Manifest are two conflicting ideas: on the one hand is an ideal to adapt to the environment. On the other hand is the necessity as well as the desire for practical, prefabricated, cheap, lightweight and, so to say, industrial construction techniques. Thus the Alpenvereinshutten are in form and construction linked with the ideal of traditional, simple Alpine houses and have their origin in a characteristic simultaneity of traditionalism and progressivity.
