Do you know Reinhold Messner? The world famous mountaineer, who climed the Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen for the first time. Well, he not only climbed the hightest and most difficult mointains, he also made some business out of his fame. He wrote more than 60 books, he served as politician, he is holding seminars and workshops and is giving speeches around the world.
But that is not enough for a man of his format. He wants to give the mountains, his work and and life a memorial place.
After the opening of the first museum in 2006 and five branch museums folllowed. All dedicated to topics around mountains.
The photos above show the latest and last museum, which opened in 2015 at the Kronplatz
(2275m ), a mountain in Italy.
Unmistakably the building was designed by Zaha Hadid.
Zaha Hadid did a lot of controverse projects in the past. The DDP (Dongdaemun Design Plaza) in Seoul, South Korea and the design of a stadium for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olypmics (which was chancelled after a lot of protest).
This museum produced also a lot of negative ressonance in the public.
Reinhold Messners intention is to inform and give an insight to the nature of the mountains. He wants to make people aware of the special kind of natural space and to protect this sensitive biosphere.
However, how much are we as humans allowed to transform nature with architecture?
Human kind already rebuild and changed a lot of the space on this planet to their needs.
Messner is a symbol of human expandation to extreme places on our planet. He proofed once again, that humans are able conquer the most extreme natural conditions.
I think it is also the responsibility of architects, designers and politicians to decide, to what extend we should interfere with nature.
Human kind is still stuck in the belief of the age of industralisation, where it was common sense that we can control nature and shape it to our advantage. Of course a lot of change happend during this time and new ideas of enviromental protection and the recent up-cycling trend came up. But still there is a long way to go. And I personally think we all have to step back and give nature finally a break.