Local Mountain

Research
Exhibition
Digital Publication



Courage or stupidity?

From its beginnings in the 1930s, ski flying has developed its own distinct history. Although the sport of skiing in North America is little more than a century old, researchers have dated a rock carving of a skier, found on the Norwegian island of Rodoy as being over 4,000 years old. Besides the spectacle of a human body flung into suspenseful precarity, it is difficult not to be fascinated by the infrastructure that supports the sport of ski flying; the provisional, often delicate, and yet sublime architectural structures that make human flight possible, if only briefly. This research sets out to collect and synthesize the history and spirit of the sport through an architectural analysis of its artifice, ambitions, spectacle, and folly.