by Mark Hershberger, Principal and Susan Best Keefe, Marketing Director

Design Workshop

There is a worldwide trend towards leisure and tourism as many people are recognizing that tourism has the potential to provide a stronger economic base for their community. Owners, developers, and operators have responded with aggressive building programs which have dramatically altered the resort business. However, to succeed, resort developers must broaden their perspectives. The modern resort must provide the entire vacation experience, maximizing resources and facilities. Above all, in the design of a contemporary resort, the Landscape Architect must create an environmentally responsive model, looking beyond property boundaries to preserve the landscape and cultural context upon which the resort experience depends. In a nutshell, "environmentally responsive ski area design" is design which emerges from its natural environment.

The design of a ski area should be driven by its surrounding conditions, not by expectations to be a ski area similar to "all the others." One does not duplicate Aspen, Colorado in Korea, for example. The key to environmentally responsive design is understanding the unique characteristics of each site and designing trails and villages to blend with the natural setting.

Now more than ever, part of the skiing experience is knowing that the mountain terrain has been minimally disturbed. Skiers have become more aware of the environment, both in terms of protection and enjoyment. They are no longer going to the ski resorts just to ski, but also to experience the great outdoors. They are not simply satisfied with a chair lift and a snow-covered hill, cruising up and down the mountain at neck-breaking speeds. Today they are searching for an understanding, awareness and concern for the conservation and protection of these natural areas. Understanding this mind-set of the consumer has created the demand for environmentally responsive design of ski areas.

A Mountain's Identity

The primary emphasis in this type of design is to try to work the natural conditons as much as possible and not to manipulate the land. The focus is to incorporate those natural conditions into the design. Without sensitivity to the conditions, the overall character of the area will be lost. All sites and natural attributes drive the final form and character of the resort. The attributes are vegetation types and sizes, topography, weather conditions, wildlife, and social and cultural conditions of the region. If the natural setting is manipulated too much, it no longer feels natural, it feels man-made. And people can tell. If a ski trail does not work in harmony with the natural "fall line" (mountain slope) then the result is a homogenous feeling of a ski slope condition that could be anywhere. The mountain no longer has an identity of its own.

The idea to this "site specific" design is to make the skiing experience feel like it is unique to a particular mountain. The technique used to accomplish this is minimum slope disturbance, incorporation of natural vegetation, minimal disturbances of streams and drainages, and, in areas that are disturbed, immediate revegetation of native plant materials.

A technique emphasized in the design of ski lifts and mountain facilities is to place them into existing natural openings and flat areas, minimizing the amount of earth to be moved and trees to be cut. This process results in a feeling that visitors were gently placed into the environment, instead of imposed on it. An example where this technique is being applied is the proposed restaurant at Muju Resort in Korea. The one-story restaurant proposes that the natural grade come up onto the side and over the top of the facility so it looks like it is part of the natural environment. The building "emerges" from the mountain, blending beautifully with its surroundings. On this particular project, areas where land will be disrupted, large quantities of plant materials will be planted back onto the disturbed areas to appear as if it had always been that way. Some of the new native vegetation will be as high as 60' tall.

Another example of minimizing the disturbance of the natural setting is at the Snowmass Ski Area in Colorado, where Design Workshop worked with the Aspen Skiing Company to prepare expansion plans for the Burnt Mountain area. The proposed trails passed through one of the last significant elk migration corridors in the Snowmass Valley. With the firm's expertise, ski trails and base facilities were all sited to preserve the migration corridor and enhance the elk habitat. Without a thorough understanding of the development's impacts on the wildlife, facilities and trails may have significantly impacted the elk migration patterns, reducing the biological diversity of the species and ultimately endangering the survival of these animals.

Base Area and Village Design

In base area design, several issues need to be considered to achieve environmentally responsive design. Access and transportation, the location of skier facilities, including hotels and restaurants, housing, and summertime recreational facilities all emerge out of the final development program. At Muju Resort, the plan encourages the use of mass transit and minimizes the need for automobiles. Nancy Locke, Landscape Architect for the project, says that early plans call for a monorail as the means of mass transit. The base village design focuses designing to a pedestrian scale to increase walking. Design Workshop closely examines walking distances, understanding how far a person will walk before they tire, even in ski boots. They also include the design of pedestrian walkways and trails, bicycle trails, and cross country ski trails to creat alternative connections through the village center.

At Park Avenue in South Lake Tahoe, CA, the firm developed a transit program which includes an intermodal transportation center to allow a connenction between the public transportation system and access to the mountain via a new proposed gondola to Heavenly Ski Area. Not only will this allow people from outside the immediate area to have direct access to the mountain, but it will also offer 3,000 hotel rooms with a direct walking connection to skiing and summer access to the mountain.

It is the best case scenario for a design firm such as Design Workshop to brought into these resort projects at the initial stage to address tourism development from a regional perspective. Each location has its own unique virtues and challenges. Communities should approach resort and tourism development by first gaining a clear understanding of the impacts on the region. There are no simple solutions. It is essential to address all aspects of resort development concurrently to better respond to the environmental challenges while at the same time creating the best possible resort experience. LASN

Some Captions and By-Lines

The design firm should help communities make environmentally responsible decisions with its knowledge in ski trail design, facility planning, base village design, and transportation planning, and in the analysis of natural ecosystems, including forestry protection, wetland mitigation, wildlife protection, and water conservation. Design Workshop has made computers an integral part of their practice in order to be able to more dramatically demonstrate the options available to the community that take the above criteria into consideration, quickly processing the volumes of data that are involved.

Design Workshop has been working for 25 years in the planning and design of ski areas and winter resorts throughout the world. They continue to lead the movement of environmentally responsive and sensitive resort development, and have made significant contributions fto resorts from South America to Asia.

Design Workshop is applying environmentally responsive design techniques everyday. As a "process-oriented" design firm they begin with the understanding of the natural conditions, physical conditions, and social conditions of a site. The development of the resort comes from this interpretation.

Design Workshop, an international landscape architectural and planning firm specializing in environmentally sensitive ski areas and resort villages,

They bring an approach to recreational resorts all over the world. They developed ski area master plans for Tanbara Resort, located in the pristine Chiba Prefecture in Japan, and created the ski area master plan for Sakhalin Ski Area in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia. They have prepared a resort feasibility study in Valle Nevado, Chile fo rthe World Bank, and are creating a guide for determining what type of trail systems to develop throughout the mountain regions of France. They have worked for over twenty-five national parks and have been involved in a host of resort and recreational projects throughout North America, from Heavenly in Lake Tahoe, CA to Blackcomb British Columbia.