Le Alpi come campo di sperimentazione

For the Turin School of Architecture, the Alps have long constituted a privileged field in which teaching, research, and design could intersect with territorial governance, heritage conservation, and social change. Starting from the postwar debates of the Bardonecchia conferences, the chapter traces the gradual shift from the heroic modernist vision of mountain development to more interdisciplinary approaches to the study of alpine territories. It reconstructs the School’s studies on rural architecture, settlement patterns, material culture, and conservation, highlighting the role of survey, restoration, and heritage interpretation in shaping both research and pedagogy. From the 1960s onward, the mountain also emerged as a public policy issue, linked to depopulation, services, infrastructure, tourism, and new forms of local governance. The chapter then traces the renewed centrality of the Alps from the late 1990s and early 2000s through the research activities carried out within the Istituto di Architettura Montana.