Eagle River Headwaters, Colorado | Unbuilt Concepts

Set within the high alpine scar tissue of Colorado’s mining past, our prompt is to explore architecture as artifact — a series of structures quietly embedded within the desolate landscape between Climax and Minturn, where the Eagle River is born from fractured rock and snowmelt runoff. These dwellings occupy the liminal zone between civilization and wilderness.

Once carved by industry, the site now bears the residue of extraction: tailings piles, collapsed adits, and slopes stripped to mineral bone. Against this backdrop, each volume is conceived both as a home and a remnant — a restrained intervention recalling the infrastructural ghosts of the region’s past. Our approach was one of restraint and precision. The architecture draws from the land’s tectonic logic: sloped talus, fractured stone, and the horizontal rhythm of alpine geology. Every element is essential, nothing here is indulgent.

The architecture is elemental: darkened timber, cast concrete, and oxidized steel weathering into the terrain. Each volume is embedded in sheared terrain, its concrete foundations cinched to ridgelines as though to keep them from drifting into the sky.

Glazed openings are deliberate with each aperture a calibrated response to view, light, and exposure. Inside, the architecture turns inward: compressed thresholds, filtered light, and textured walls create spaces that are as much psychological as physical. Each structure and space is meant to comfort and provide clarity — built for reflection in a setting that has moved past noise, past ideology, and into something quieter.