American artist Doug Aitken has installed a mirrored cabin atop a mountain in Switzerland. Inspired by the archetypical traditional cabin in the American west, the project serves as an art piece and will be open to visitors for two years.
The cabin is named Mirage Gstaad and is part of Aitken's Mirage series, which includes two other cabins: one in the Southern California desert simply called Mirage that's inspired by architect Frank Lloyd Wright and another called Mirage Detroit that puts a mirrored American suburban home into a former State Savings Bank dating back to 1900.
As its name suggests, Mirage Gstaad is installed on the Videmanette mountain near the town Gstaad, in Bern, Switzerland, and is situated at an elevation of 1,202 m (3,493 ft). It's made from wood and steel, with a mirrored aluminum finish. This covers the entire exterior and most of the interior. The striking structure reflects the slowly changing landscape around it.
"As Mirage Gstaad pulls the landscape in and reflects it back out, this classic one-story suburban house becomes a framing device, a perceptual echo-chamber endlessly bouncing between the dream of nature as pure uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest," says the press release. "Situated against the backdrop of Videmanette in Gstaad, Mirage Gstaad will bring the idea of the Manifest Destiny and the American West into contact with the European landscape and the tradition of the sublime."
The cabin was part of the Elevation 1049: Frequencies art festival that recently took place over two days. This year focused mostly on live performances.
Mirage Gstaad will be at the Videmanette site until 2021. If you'd like to visit, be sure to pack some sensible shoes as it's a fifteen minute hike up there from the nearest train station.
Sources: Doug Aitken, Elevation 1049
