Fly High Kühtai

Skiing school, shop refurbishment
by: Daniel Koehler, Rasa Navasaityte with Stefan Schrott
2009.
Located at the corner of an all too common hotel on the main road of the ski-resort Kühtai/ Alps, we have got our first commission for a physical image change of a Ski School. Before the renovation, the shop was more a sporadic ticket seller through a normal street window. No public access, and only one plastic board as appearance/ advertisement. As a first step, we changed the shop to an interior, aiming for a brute materiality according to the high-frequency of tourists in ski clothes and heavy boots. The Alps have already this brute appearance with their limestone and dolomite, which we found also used in the existing facade as natural stone bricks. We rearranged the existing natural bricks into a shop counter, continuing the outer facade to the inside, but keeping the materiality as a definition between inside = teacher and outside = tourist zone. The amount of existing natural stones defines the size of the table; all removed stones were reused again.With the amplification of the existing narrative, by using what we have already owned, we could shift the focus of the budget to the development of an original narrative for the Ski-School. By rethinking the connection of diffusion, pleasure, discrete flow and skiing, we realized a field of light poles.
Mirroring the movement of the table into the visible zone of a flaneur, we are using a cloud of lights as a subtle image for this Ski School. Epilog: The client increased his profit dramatically since the shop opened. Design still matters. For us its a very nice feeling to see the first useful result in a real environment of our long-term use of $var[] = `getSetMove OOP rocs && co`;