Zelthaus, a UFO in the mountains

Justus Dahinden’s first project was built in 1954 in the Swiss mountains where his father worked as a ski instructor. This chalet was the first of his projects to be built and was already an experimental design in which he explored sloping forms. Highly critical of the lack of aesthetic vision in modern architecture, he drew on primitive architectural forms (pyramids, domes, spheres) to develop his own architectural language. In doing so, he broke with the right angle and found in the sloping façade a way of reaching towards the sky. The shift of the vertical structure into an oblique plane enabled him to design his ‘cosmoforms’, a concept aimed at helping humankind to connect with the cosmos.
The Zelthaus (tent house) on the Rigi is both an inaugural project and a manifesto. Justus Dahinden chose to place a pyramidal form on a mountainside, as if it were a structure that had landed from the sky rather than a house built from the ground up.