Swiss architects Group8 have won a competition to build luxury villas as part of a new mountain resort called New Andermatt in Switzerland.

The project is confidential for now but Group8 tell us the villas will be completed by 2009.

Here's a bit of text from the architects:

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NEW ANDERMATT

New Andermatt is a unique opportunity to rethink our relation to radical landscapes and traditional settlements, a rare occasion to implant a new urban structure in a breathtaking mountain context.

Although the new village will be attached to the existing village of Andermatt, its character, its architecture and organization will be fatally different. Tradition, nature and contemporary culture will live together in an harmonious exchange.

How can architecture deal with such a strong and powerful site? How can modernity be installed in this traditional context? New Andermatt will be faced with these two fundamental questions. It will be a place where architecture will be confronted to its condition of altering any context in which it inscribes itself.

It will certainly prove its capacities of integrating itself in the history of mountain settlements and it will probably partially fail to establish a real dialogue with nature at its most powerful and beautiful demonstration.

The New Andermatt will be a dreamlike experience. It will belong to the ancient and ambiguous experience of admiration and fear of nature. New Andermatt is a carved dream.