Evolver is an inhabitable sculpture built for the Zermatt Festival, the renowned annual event for Chamber Music, featuring the Berlin Philharmonic amongst many others. As an architectural artefact, it was designed and executed by a team of architecture students in ALICE’s second year studio. Evolver intervenes spatially on the panorama surrounding Zermatt: in an effort to take full advantage of the site’s extensive and astounding views, the project sits strategically next to the lake Stelli at an altitude of 2536m. Its structure consists mainly of a succession of 24 rotating frames, supporting a space enclosed but accessible to visitors. As he or she progresses through the space, a concealed but uninterrupted 720° movement is unravelling along a transformed panorama. This transformation occurs inside, while a person is moving along a selective string of openings only to be caught peeling off a sequence of unexpected views from the original landscape. Wobbling below and above a distant horizon, ground and sky have been re-orchestrated into an orbiting panorama by a journey that has already culminated to where it started: a loophole on the skyline.
team: Dieter Dietz, Olivier Ottevaere, Daniel Pokora, Katia Ritz, ALICE EPFL
students: Ahmed Belkhodja, Augustin Clement, Nicolas Feihl, Olivier di Giambattista, Eveline Job, Martin Lepoutre, Samuel Maire, Benjamin Melly, Adrian Llewelyn Meredith, François Nantermod
photographs © Joël Tettamanti
all images courtesy of ALICE studio EPFL