This bivouac is an emergency architecture, but also a micro-museum

Located at 2,300 meters above sea level in the Val Seriana, amid rugged snowy canyons and alpine pastures about 100 kilometers north of Milan, the bivouac stands along one of Lombardy’s most renowned and demanding hiking trails: the Alta Via delle Orobie Bergamasche. The Aldo Frattini Bivouac is a shelter — one of many punctuating the 120 kilometers of this route between silver peaks and green valleys — but it is also a unique architectural work: the first alpine emergency refuge ever made from textile materials.
Halfway between a technological outpost and a contemporary art museum, it continues the research path of Ex., the architecture studio founded by Andrea Cassi and Michele Versaci, known for its experimental projects in extreme environments.

Compact in size (3.75 x 2.60 x 2.60 m) and light in weight (under 2,500 kg), resting on a minimal footprint, the Frattini Bivouac features an innovative weather-resistant textile “skin,” developed in collaboration with Ferrino, the historic Italian outdoor brand. It looks like a lunar-landing tent, with two small panoramic portholes hidden among red drapes, armored doors, and a steel staircase entrance reminiscent of a spacecraft hatch. A prototype — the first of its kind — the bivouac employs a custom construction system designed for rapid assembly and minimal impact on the terrain.

It can host up to nine people and conceals an entire world within: natural cork cladding for thermal and acoustic insulation, perimeter benches following the curve of the space, a skylight, and a series of foldable beds inspired by alpinist portaledges — lightweight frame platforms used by climbers to sleep on vertical walls — which, in this case, can also serve as emergency stretchers.

Like other recently built bivouacs in the Alps, it embodies the essence of minimal living and concentrates much of today’s architectural experimentation. Its conceptual roots go back to Shelter (1973) by Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton, a book celebrating lightweight, self-built, and temporary forms of dwelling. Like the fragile huts and tents documented in those pages, the new Frattini Bivouac recognizes impermanence and adaptability as essential qualities.

The project stems from a collaboration between GAMeC and the Bergamo branch of the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), as part of Thinking Like a Mountain – The First Orobie Biennale, a program curated by Lorenzo Giusti that, since May 2024, has been taking the museum beyond traditional art spaces to explore the Bergamo territory. We previously covered it on Domus with Maurizio Cattelan’s citywide exhibition Seasons, inaugurated last summer.

Within this broad biennial program intertwining art and the environment, the new Frattini Bivouac may be its most emblematic element. Equipped with environmental sensors, the structure will also function as a scientific outpost, monitoring and transmitting mountain data directly to the museum’s headquarters in the heart of Bergamo — a true museum branch at high altitude.

All images: Courtesy Gamec-Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo. Ph. @Tomaso Clavarino