27.5 x 31 cm

ISBN 978-3-03860-237-8

The constellation of architecture and landscape inspired Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia to create a visual epos. The result is a unique image of the new read maintenance base near Bernina Pass, designed by renowned Swiss firm Bearth & Deplazes Architekten, in a seemingly arctic winter landscape. Baselgia explored the territory along the road and railway line with his analogue camera. His images also relate the existing infrastructures for traffic and energy production, built in the course of the landscape’s industrialization and development since the late 19th century, to the architecture of the new maintenance base.

A concavely curved shield wall topped by a round tower is all that is visible of this vast, purely functional and largely underground space. The shield wall cuts a segment from the topography and thereby encloses a courtyard along with an area of the surrounding landscape. The tower refuses direct encoding—until entering the camera obscura at its very top, which connects photography, architecture, and landscape to reveal that here it is about insights and not outlooks.

The book features a selection of Guido Baselgia’s striking photographs and reproductions of camera obscura images from the tower it outstanding duotone reproduction and documents the Bearth & Deplazes’ architecture through concise texts images, and selected plans.

Guido Baselgia is a freelance photographer based in Malans. He realizes projects in Switzerland, Europa and Latin Amreica, some of which involve extensive and complex expeditions.

Valentin Bearth is a professor of design at USI’s Academia di architettura der USI in Mendrisio, Andrea Deplazes is a professor of architecture and construction at ETH Zurich. Since 1988, they run their own firm Bearth & Deplazes in Chur.