When the Modern Was the Tradition: Carlo Mollino at Sestriere and His Last Unpublished project (1973)

The Alps have often been considered a laboratory for architectural modernity. Buildings there were a litmus test to reveal the attitudes of 20th-century architects towards design. When Carlo Mollino designed a project for a Club Med hotel in Sestriere in 1973, which was neither built nor published, he was at the end not only of his career but also of an important era for architecture that had begun just after World War II and ended in the economic crisis of the early 1970s. During this time, a debate on modern architecture acquired a new and increasingly important focus on context; Alpine architecture was at the forefront. The Club Med design was the culmination of Mollino’s series of reflections on modernism. In the 1950s, he conceived of buildings for a sophisticated public, and his final project was a megastructure for mass tourism. The ski-resort town of Sestriere, founded by the Agnelli family in the early 1930s, was created for the consumption of nature by the masses, just as the Agnelli family produced Fiat cars for mass consumption. It was the first resort town where rationalism, speed, mass consumption, and the dominion of man over nature were the focus of urban and architectural design. Mollino’s Club Med design was for a hotel that would be a machine for tourist consumption in the mountains. This project was one of the last examples of a way of consuming the Alps that vanished in subsequent years.