What if a city of 2,000 people could rise in the Italian Alps — complete with restaurants, gyms, chapels, and 1,400 beds — and then vanish without leaving a single foundation stone behind?
Welcome back to FreeAstroScience.com, where we break down complex ideas into plain language — because, as Goya once warned, the sleep of reason breeds monsters. We're glad you're here, and we ask you to keep your mind fully awake and engaged, just as we always do.
Today, we take you inside the Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Village — a quietly radical piece of architecture sitting on an old airfield in the Dolomites. Whether you follow winter sports, care about sustainable design, or simply find yourself fascinated by how humans solve big problems elegantly, we promise this is worth your full attention. Read all the way to the end. There's more here than meets the eye.
A City Built to Disappear: The Olympic and Paralympic Village of Cortina d'Ampezzo
For most of Olympic history, host cities built things that stayed. Munich 1972 became a neighborhood. Rome 1960 became a residential quarter. Each Games left a scar — sometimes beautiful, sometimes not — on the city that hosted it. Cortina 2026 chose to do something completely different. And the decision is worth understanding.
Why Fiames? The Surprising Story Behind the Location
The village stands at Fiames, roughly 4 kilometers north of Cortina d'Ampezzo, deep in the Dolomites of northeastern Italy. The site looks quiet today. But it carries memory.
Fiames is where the old Cortina Airport once operated — a small airfield built in the wake of the 1956 Winter Olympics to link the mountain resort with Venice, Milan, and Bolzano. Short flights over the Alps. A charming idea, until a series of tragic accidents forced the airport's closure in 1976. The land sat largely idle for decades after that.
That dormant past is exactly why planners picked it. Fiames was already a disturbed site — already used, already touched. Building here meant zero consumption of new soil. No meadow cleared. No forest edge moved. The site selection was itself an environmental decision, made before a single home was delivered.
The village is one of 31 event-specific projects out of 98 total infrastructure works managed by SIMICO — Società Infrastrutture Milano Cortina — the public company overseeing a total investment of €3.4 billion across Northern Italy for the 2026 Games. Unlike the permanent legacy works in that broader program, the Cortina village was designed from day one to leave no trace.
How Do You Build a City Without Digging a Single Hole?
The Radical Engineering Logic
Here's a question that sounds almost philosophical: how do you build real infrastructure — water, electricity, heating, sewage — across 15,000 square meters, for 2,000 people, and make absolutely none of it permanent?
The answer at Cortina is elegant. Everything rests on the earth, not in it. No excavation. No foundations. No buried pipes. Every cable, every tube, every utility line sits just above the ground level, integrated into a continuous system of elevated walkways running approximately 70 centimeters above the surface. Under each of those walkways, the village's entire utility backbone — water, power, heating, drainage — runs as a single, removable spine. When the Games end, you take the walkways apart, and the infrastructure comes with them.
Think of it like the underside of a raised stage at a concert. Everything is connected, everything works, and everything can be rolled away when the show is done.
Energy and Water: Powerful, Clean, and Temporary
Heating 377 homes through an Alpine February demands serious capacity. The village is served by a low-impact thermal plant fuelled by liquefied natural gas (LNG), fitted with a regasifier. It can sustain the thermal load of a fully occupied international community — athletes from every climate on Earth, many of whom will need their accommodation warm at 3 AM after late training sessions. The system performs. And once the Paralympic closing ceremony at Cortina on 15 March 2026 ends the Games, it gets dismantled.
Water management follows the same discipline. A dedicated water treatment plant installed specifically for the Games handles wastewater from the entire settlement, channeling it into Cortina's existing municipal sewage network. No environmental contamination. No lasting intervention.
377 Mobile Homes: What Does Life Actually Look Like Here?
The homes themselves are made by Crippaconcept, an Italian company specializing in high-quality prefabricated residential units. Each one measures 8.60 × 4.50 meters — roughly the floor plan of a generously sized studio apartment. Inside: two rooms, two beds per room, a maximum of four occupants. Fully furnished. Fully insulated. Individually heated.
Compact? Absolutely. But athletes don't need mansions before competition. They need rest, warmth, and quiet — and the homes deliver all three.
What makes the design genuinely interesting is the visual approach. Each home wears a different exterior color inspired by the natural tones of wood — amber, ash, cedar, pine. And instead of organizing them in rigid military rows, the designers positioned them asymmetrically, deliberately breaking the predictable rhythm you'd expect from a prefab site. The result reads less like a temporary camp and more like an organic extension of the Dolomite hillside above it.
"This project marks a turning point in the way we conceive temporary structures for large-scale events. With this initiative, we are demonstrating how mobile homes can be an outstanding solution not only for seasonal tourism, but also for major international events."
One more milestone worth naming: the Cortina village is the first Olympic project in history to rely exclusively on mobile homes for athlete accommodation. No bricks. No mortar. No concrete poured anywhere. That's a genuine architectural first in the 130-year modern Olympic tradition.
From 24-Hour Canteen to Chapel: Inside the Village Services
The homes are just the beginning. At the physical and logistical heart of the settlement sit two large service pavilions, color-coded so an athlete arriving jet-lagged from the opposite side of the planet can orient themselves immediately — no map required.
The red pavilion holds the main food area: a massive canteen open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. International menus. Dietary requirements from dozens of cultures and cuisines. No one goes hungry at 2 AM after a recovery session, regardless of where on Earth they were born.
The green pavilion covers everything else: meeting rooms for team briefings, gyms for last-minute warm-ups, laundry facilities, personal care services. And something that might surprise you — dedicated religious spaces for at least six different faiths. Because 2,000 people from the world's nations bring their whole selves to the Games, not just their athletic bodies.
The Logistics Engine Nobody Sees
Behind the scenes, the logistic compound runs the village's operational heartbeat: coordinating supplies, managing maintenance, keeping everything moving without interruption. In the weeks before the Olympic opening, delegations shipped their competition equipment here — bobsleds, luge sleds, alpine skis, biathlon rifles — all tracked, stored, and ready when needed. Think of it as the backstage of a very large, very cold theatre production, where the stage crew is as important as the performers.
Access for Everyone: What Makes This Village a Paralympic First
I want to say something personal here. As someone who navigates the world from a wheelchair, and as President of FreeAstroScience, I've encountered more "accessible" venues than I can count — venues where the ramp was added as an afterthought, the elevator technically exists, and the bathroom door technically opens if you happen to have the grip strength of a competitive athlete.
The Cortina Olympic Village does something fundamentally different. And I mean that with real weight.
Approximately 50% of all beds in the village are fully accessible to Paralympic athletes — even though the Paralympics brings roughly five times fewer athletes than the main Olympics. That isn't just a figure. That's a design philosophy. It says: we didn't build for the majority first and patch things together for everyone else afterward. Accessibility was written into the project from the very first drawing.
The elevated walkways? Not a concession to disabled athletes. They're the primary circulation system for every single person in the village. The wide corridors? Not special. Standard. There is no "accessible section" tucked into a corner. Inclusion here isn't a feature — it's the architecture.
For us at FreeAstroScience, this is more than good architecture. It's good reasoning. Designing for the most constrained user produces better outcomes for everyone. That principle applies in astrophysics, in engineering, and in life.
The €38 Million Question: Is Building Temporary Worth It?
Let's be honest about the money. This village — thoughtful, sustainable, and first-of-its-kind — cost €38 million to build. That covers all 377 mobile homes, 15,000 m² of modular service structures, the raised walkway network, the LNG energy plant, the water treatment system, and the logistic compound.
This figure excludes dismantling and disposal costs. Still, compare it to the cost of building permanent structures in a mountain town of 5,500 residents that would sit largely empty for 49 other weeks of the year.
The design journal Domus raised this figure critically, and rightly so — €2.2 million per day is a legitimate question, not a trivial one. But the traditional alternative carries its own heavy price: permanent buildings in a fragile alpine environment, infrastructure sized for an event rather than a community, housing that becomes a burden instead of a benefit.
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Location | Fiames, ~4 km north of Cortina d'Ampezzo (BL), Italy |
| Site history | Former Cortina Airport (opened post-1956 Games, closed 1976) |
| Designed & managed by | SIMICO — Società Infrastrutture Milano Cortina |
| Mobile home supplier | Crippaconcept (Made in Italy) |
| Total capacity | Up to 2,000 people (athletes, technical staff, delegations) |
| Number of mobile homes | 377 units |
| Total bed capacity | 1,400 |
| Each home dimensions | 8.60 × 4.50 m | 2 rooms | 2 beds per room | max 4 occupants |
| Service structure area | ~15,000 m² (fully modular) |
| Elevated walkway height | ~70 cm above ground; full utility network runs underneath |
| Energy system | LNG thermal plant with on-site regasifier (temporary) |
| Water management | Dedicated purifier → Cortina municipal sewage network |
| Accessible beds | ~50% of total (fully integrated — no separate zones) |
| Religions served | At least 6 (dedicated spaces in green pavilion) |
| Red pavilion | Food & beverage — canteen open 24/7 |
| Green pavilion | Meeting rooms, gyms, laundry, personal care, religious spaces |
| Permanent foundations | None — zero excavation, zero buried infrastructure |
| Total project cost | €38 million |
| Cost per day (17-day Olympics) | ≈ €2.24 million/day |
| Environmental footprint after Games | Zero — full restoration to pre-Games state |
After the Torch Goes Out: Where Do 377 Homes Go?
When the Closing Ceremony lights fade at Cortina on 15 March 2026, the machines move in. The village dismantles itself — home by home, walkway by walkway, utility spine by utility spine. The LNG plant comes down. The water purifier is removed. The logistic compound disappears. The land at Fiames returns to the state it was in before any of this began.
But the 377 mobile homes don't go to waste. Each one gets a second act. Some will enter the open-air tourism hospitality market — think glamping sites, mountain retreat parks, lakeside campgrounds across Italy. Others may be redirected toward social uses, including emergency housing and community support programs. Their final destination will be confirmed in the weeks following the Paralympic Games.
"The value of the project does not end with the event — it extends through time, changing shape."
The Dolomites won't carry a scar. That promise was made at the start of the project, and it's being kept.
A Blueprint for Future Games — and Beyond
What makes Cortina 2026 genuinely exciting — and we use that word carefully — isn't just the engineering. It's the idea. And that idea is already being packaged for wider use.
Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 partnered with the Politecnico di Milano to build a formal Sustainability Protocol for Temporary Infrastructure. This system scores temporary structures on environmental criteria: percentage of recycled materials, ease of disassembly, potential for reuse, sustainable site management. The goal is a recognized standard — one that stands alongside established frameworks like LEED or BREEAM, but designed specifically for major sporting and public events.
The protocol has already been tested at the Milano Cortina venues and is now being piloted with the FIS (International Ski Federation) and the IBU (International Biathlon Union) for future international competitions. If it holds — and early signs are encouraging — future Olympic hosts will have a real, evidence-based framework for building events without permanently altering the places that host them.
We're watching something new being invented, right now, in the Alps. Whether or not you care about the Olympics, that kind of practical innovation deserves attention.
Our Take: The Quiet Revolution Nobody Talked About
The Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Village is easy to underestimate. From the outside, it's a collection of prefabricated homes on a disused airfield in the mountains. No grand skyline. No iconic dome. And that's precisely the point.
In a world where big events leave big messes — abandoned stadiums, displaced communities, mountains of debt and concrete — this village asks a different question: what if we got genuinely good at temporary? What if "legacy" stopped meaning "permanent" by default?
For 377 mobile homes to shelter 2,000 people from across the globe, serve six religions, keep a canteen running around the clock, offer 50% of beds fully accessible without a single segregated zone, and do all of it while resting — just resting — on the surface of the earth... that's not a small achievement. That's a quiet revolution in how we think about large-scale human gatherings.
At FreeAstroScience, science and design are, at heart, the same discipline: both ask how we solve a hard problem with elegance rather than brute force. The Cortina village is an elegant solution. It deserves to be studied, refined, and copied.
Come back to FreeAstroScience.com whenever you want to go a little deeper — into science, design, human ingenuity, or the world you move through every day. We'll keep writing, keep questioning, and keep reminding you: the sleep of reason breeds monsters. Stay curious.
Sources
- Sabatino, M. (2026, Feb. 22). Come funziona il Villaggio Olimpico e Paralimpico di Cortina, la "città temporanea" dei Giochi 2026. Geopop.it. geopop.it
- Campingbusiness.eu (2025). Milan-Cortina 2026: The Cortina Olympic Village focuses on sustainable hospitality. campingbusiness.eu
- Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 & Politecnico di Milano (2025). Towards a Protocol for the Sustainability of Temporary Infrastructure. Olympics.com. olympics.com
- Domusweb.it (2026, Feb. 13). Olympic unsustainability. domusweb.it
- IPC — International Paralympic Committee (2024). 500 Days to Go — Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. paralympic.org
- Paralympics New Zealand (2025). Sustainability and Inclusion at Milano Cortina 2026. paralympics.org.nz
- SIMICO S.p.A. / Autodesk Tandem (2026). SIMICO delivers infrastructure for Milano Cortina Winter Games. LinkedIn. linkedin.com
- La Milano (2025). Minister Locatelli on inclusion, accessibility, and the 2026 Paralympics. lamilano.it
- Paralympics.org.nz (2025). When Are the Next Paralympic Winter Games? Complete Guide to Milano Cortina 2026. paralympics.org.nz
- IPC (2025). Seven Legacies of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. paralympic.org
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