The Fragile Mountain: Regenerative Architecture Engaging Erosion and Material Flows in the Alpine Landscape | Master’s Design Thesis

Site Context

The project is situated at the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest and most visited mountain, where the Partnach river carries eroded material from a shrinking glacier down toward the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Field research revealed that significant human effort is already invested in maintaining this landscape: ski-lifts are dismantled as glaciers move, driftwood is extracted to prevent gorge blockages, and bedload rock is regularly removed from a weir to mitigate build-up. These materials are currently treated as waste and discarded.

The project intervenes just upstream of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a flood-prone town, proposing a material collection hub for these otherwise wasted materials. The program combines flood mitigation infrastructure with public and educational functions of a sculpting school with workshop spaces and a café. These functions allow the material flows of the mountain to be reused, displayed, and engaged with, turning maintenance processes into spatial, social, and cultural activators.

Design Process

The design process began with geological research into the formation of the Alps and the role of erosion over deep time. This was followed by extensive fieldwork, starting with a multiple day hike along the river’s course from glacier to valley, including mapping and material sampling. During this process, observations of infrastructure, material accumulation, and conversations with construction and maintenance workers revealed the scale and logic of existing extraction systems. These findings were translated into analytical drawings that traced material flows across different scales.

From these findings a design process started in which physical erosion models were developed to test how bedload rock behaves within gabion structures under varying water conditions, informing the design of flood-mitigating elements. Parallel to this, material experiments with driftwood explored stacking, drying, and deformation over time. 

Rather than separating research and design, the two evolved simultaneously: mapping became a design tool, while models and prototypes functioned as research instruments. The process remained deliberately open-ended, allowing the project to grow out of observed landscape dynamics.

Final Outcome

The final outcome is a network of small-scale architectural and landscape interventions that intercept and reuse eroded material flows. At its core is an infrastructural platform in the valley that gradually accumulates driftwood and rock. It is carried by strong gabion walls, which are filled with bedload rock to slow the river during floods while making erosion visible through changing delta-like formations.

Driftwood is sawn into slabs and stacked to form the load-bearing structure of a sculpting school, whose walls and roof evolve as material availability changes. Sliding walls provide functional enclosure, while the wooden stacks remain exposed to environmental forces, allowing the building to settle, distort, and age. Dismantled ski lifts are reused as roof structures, extending their material life.

The project does not result in a fixed architectural object but in a system that grows, moves, and records the mountain’s ongoing transformation, inviting humans to participate in erosion rather than resist it.

Conclusion: Ultimately, this project shows that architecture in fragile mountain environments can move beyond control and permanence by working with erosion and material flows, proposing an adaptive system where building, landscape, and maintenance merge to make environmental change tangible, social, and productive.

[This Academic Project has been published with text and images submitted by the student]