ADVANCED MAKING
Engineering & Innovation
The longest railway tunnel on Earth, ropeways that span mountain valleys and buildings that rebuild themselves for research.
Mountains concentrate the mind. Where roads must climb, gradients must be flattened, weather must be survived and space must be reused, engineering stops being a support discipline and becomes the main act. The Alpine region has spent a century and a half turning its geography into a laboratory for infrastructure.
The results include the longest railway tunnel in the world, ropeways that cross valleys on single unsupported spans, and research buildings whose floors are designed to be swapped out as technology changes. Behind each of them stands an ecosystem of contractors, research institutes and public clients willing to finance the unprecedented.
In this topic the Atlas looks at how these systems are engineered, what principles make them work, and what they change for the people who use them.
At 57.09 kilometres, the Gotthard Base Tunnel is the world's longest railway tunnel and, with up to 2,300 metres of rock above it, the deepest traffic tunnel ever built — a flat alpine crossing seventeen years in the making.
From Wolfurt in Vorarlberg, the world's largest ropeway manufacturer has installed more than 15,000 systems in over 95 countries — including the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, whose 3-kilometre unsupported span still holds the record for height above ground.
On the Empa campus in Dübendorf stands a building designed never to be finished: NEST, inaugurated in 2016, couples a permanent core with exchangeable research units where new construction technologies are tested under real living and working conditions.