Snøhetta proposes spiralling mountaintop museum for “Ötzi the Iceman”

Europe's oldest mummy could find a new home at the museum which unfurls from the summit of the Virgolo Mountain into a ramped terrace overlooking Bolzano in northern Italy.

The Quarter Museum is designed to host exhibition spaces for the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, including Ötzi, a 5,300 year old Copper Age mummy that was uncovered by climbers in a glacier on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991.

Snøhetta drew up the proposal for the Austrian real estate company Signa Group, which also awarded the practice the winners of its international competition in 2015 for a new cable car system to bring visitors to the top of the previously inaccessible mountain in South Tyrol.

Visuals for the proposed museum show a spiralling structure, which appears to stem from Snøhetta's earlier design for the cable car, which extends out into a terraced viewpoint overlooking the city of Bolzano.

“The new Museum Quarter will create a synthesis of city and nature, of history and future, of building and landscape, of culture, leisure and knowledge,” says Snøhetta partner Kjetil Trædal Thorsen.

“Visitors can meet Ötzi the Iceman, one of the most important archaeological discoveries, on top of the Virgl mountain – a place with a historic atmosphere. They will literally slip under the skin of the mountain, entering it to see the Iceman."