The Huts of the Swiss Alpine Club
by Marco Volken and Remo Kundert
AS Verlag, 2013.
WOW.…a comprehensive view of the world’s premier hut-to-hut hiking systems! This is a luscious feast for trip planners, armchair trekkers, architecture mavens, and dreamers and designers of future hut systems in America and elsewhere!
Take a taste right now: peruse the photo gallery of a sample of pictures the authors have kindly granted permission to use. Marco Volken’s PhD is in atmospheric physics. He founded a trekking agency, works as a freelance author and photographer, and has been involved in over two-dozen books (http://www.marcovolken.ch). Remo Kundert has worked as a photographer and journalist, was a member of the Commission of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC), and owns Mountain Holidays on Foot (http://www.ppb.ch/ppb).
Produced on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Swiss Alpine Club, this beautifully designed book comprises gorgeous photographic portraits of all 152 SAC huts. In a typical entry, a hut is sensitively portrayed with four beautiful color photographs: a large-scale, wide angle shot showing the hut in its larger landscape, two exterior shots highlighting the hut’s design and site, and an interior shot giving a sense of its social personality and ambiance.
In addition to photographs, each two-page portrait includes one short paragraph of text (printed in four languages) conveying a bit of the huts history, character, and uses.
In some of the astonishing landscape shots one has to look very closely to pick out a hut dwarfed by towering peaks, nestled in rugged valleys, or clinging to a steep mountainside. Other landscape portraits show the huts as striking features, perched or literally anchored to a dramatic promontory.
The exterior shots situate the huts more intimately on their site, showcasing hut architecture, construction methods and materials, outdoor social areas, and viewscapes.
The interiors vivify some of the chief reasons people walk from hut to hut: convivial sociability around sharing meals & shelter, stories & plans, and rest & recreation. To me, the kitchen and dining room shots bring back fond memories of warmth and tastes. The wood and stone finishes, the colorful textile and decorative elements, and the windows to the world outside induce pleasant walking reveries.
Setting the stage for the 152 photographic portraits are a useful preface by the President of the SAC and an excellent introductory essay and historical timeline by the authors “The Diverse Huts of the Swiss Alpine Club”. The rear flyleaf is a physiographic map of Switzerland with each hut marked by a red dot, showing the geographic distribution of the huts. The final 3 pages of this 332 page book present a statistical portrait of the SAC hut system, including the location, seasons of operation, capacity, and number of overnight stays in each of the huts. 327,422 guests spent a night in SAC huts in 2012.
In these portraits each hut is lovingly portrayed as a unique cultural expression of place and as a solution to a set of mountain circumstances. This book is a celebration of that diversity and of the continuing creative search in Switzerland for the ideal hut for each location. The 152 SAC huts (with 9,200 beds) portrayed in this book are just part of the total hut infrastructure of Switzerland. Many more are privately owned and operated.
Walking is the “national sport” in Switzerland and hut architecture is an honored specialty in a nation famous for architecture and design. More than any other publication I have seen, this book shows — in the language of photographs – why this is so.
–Sam Demas February 2015