Chasper Schmidlin and Lukas Voellmy have excavated into a mountain, and restored a 12th-century monastery in the Swiss Alpine town of Susch, to create an art museum.
Muzeum Susch occupies the remains of a monastery that was established in 1157 on a sloping site next to a river in the Engadin valley, which is on the route of the ancient pilgrimage from Rome to Santiago de Compostela.
The Swiss architects created exhibition spaces in the restored historic buildings and the grotto-like underground spaces, as well creating a tunnel to connect buildings on the site.

The monastery has been renovated and repurposed several times over the centuries, and in the 19th-century it was turned into a brewery situated above a mountain spring.
Schmidlin and Voellmy collaborated on the transformation of the historic site for the museum, founded by Polish entrepreneur Gra?yna Kulczyk, which aimed to maintain the character of the original structures while creating spaces appropriate to their new purpose. The buildings are protected by local Cantonal Historical Preservation Law, so it was essential to preserve the structures in their original state and perform the main alterations internally.

Additional exhibition space was created by excavating down into the mountainside, while a tunnel was created to connect buildings that are on either side of an existing road. Explosions carried out over a period lasting more than a year shifted 9,000 tonnes of rock to create the new rooms and tunn...