FORT KENT – When it came to designing a biathlon venue worthy of world-class athletes, its creator took pains to tie the activity – skiing – with history – the Fort Kent blockhouse.

A former World Cup skier designed the 10th Mountain Ski Center using the town’s best-known historical structure, its blockhouse, which is a National Historic Site.

The original blockhouse was built to handle border skirmishes with the British in the 1840s.

Peter Gallenz, 39, a former Dartmouth College classmate of Max Saenger, chief operating officer of the Maine Winter Sports Center, also designed the lodge at the Nordic Ski Center at Presque Isle.

Surrounding the Fort Kent lodge are kilometers of trails designed by John Morton, former Olympic biathlete for the United States. Morton competed in the 1972 and 1976 winter Olympic Games.

The 4-year-old Fort Kent venue was the site last week of the first Biathlon World Cup held in New England. Biathletes from 24 countries competed, and an estimated 17,000 attended the four days of competition.

The lodge was named after the U.S. Army’s famed 10th Mountain Division. The division had the best mountaineers and the best skiers in the country when it was formed 60 years ago during World War II.

More than 200 men from Maine served in the division, 15 from Aroostook County. The men in the original division came from Dartmouth College’s ski team.

“It’s a unique design, not like other buildings I’ve done,” Gallenz, now a resident of Munich, Germany, said Friday during a break during the races. “I needed to fit the design into the Maine Winter Sports Center concept, which has its roots in skiing, yet I wanted it to have something to do with Fort Kent, the blockhouse.

“It’s my interpretation of the old structure, but this structure got bigger as we worked on the design,” he said. “It changed several times, especially with the idea of international competitions here.”

The blockhouse tower idea, which is what the right side of the building looks like from the shooting range, needed a wing. It needed some atmosphere for the spectators, explained the architect.

The lodge, 88 feet long by 30 feet wide, is designed around a blockhouse motif. The building has 3,600 square feet of usable floor space on three floors.

Included in the basement is a training area. The upstairs has a conference room and small kitchen, and the third floor has office space and facilities for a pressroom overlooking the shooting range.

Much of the lodge was constructed of wood, including cedar siding, decorative wood lathes, and a wooden balustrade around most of the building.

“We needed energy and atmosphere,” Gallenz said. “I also wanted a lot of local input for the design.”

Morton’s connection to the Maine Winter Sports Center can also be traced back to Dartmouth, where he coached a young skier named Max Cobb, chief of competition at the World Cup.

These days Morton designs Nordic centers out of Thetford, Vt. It was Cobb who, together with Saenger and Andy Sheapard, a ski enthusiast from Yarmouth, began serious discussions in 1998 about constructing a Nordic ski center in northern Maine, Morton said.

Gallenz answered Saenger’s call four years ago because it “sounded like an exciting project.”

“When I first came here I found great terrain, and a great location for a site,” he said. “I spent a week here, looking for different spots for the lodge, and talking with local people.”

Gallenz, originally of Rockford, Ill., a World Cup skier for five years on the U.S. national team, ended up living in Germany because he did his graduate work in architecture there.

At Fort Kent, he worked closely with Morton.

Among the first to jump on board the project in Fort Kent was local businessman Carl Theriault.

“We knew we had the hills and the terrain here,” Theriault said on Saturday. “At the time there were some trails here and [Morton] had some great ideas on how to set the whole thing up.”

Fort Kent, Theriault said, had long enjoyed a reputation among high school ski teams in Maine as having challenging trails.

That, coupled with the area’s strong commitment and support of the local teams, caught the attention and, more importantly, the funding of the Portland-based Libra Foundation.

“When I designed this course, I knew I would take a two-pronged approach,” Morton said. “I had to create a facility capable of holding events like [the 2004 World Cup] and that makes [Nordic] skiing accessible to all skiers in Aroostook County.”

Morton spent time with Theriault scouting out possible sites in Fort Kent while considering variables such as terrain, access issues, safety and land availability.

The two, Theriault said, spent a lot of time tramping the woods around Fort Kent.

“A lot of time the people involved think you have to make the most difficult course possible,” he said. “Then it is virtually useless after the event for recreational use.”

That’s not the plan for this facility. Morton also knew his course would have to have a shelf life beyond any World Cup competition.