The first designs for what could become the world’s tallest hotel– with room rates from £675 to £16,000 a night – have been unveiled.
The giant tower extends 381 metres above the peaceful alpine resort of Vals and contains 107 bedrooms as well as a spa, restaurants, a sky bar, a swimming pool, a library, a ballroom and an art gallery.
It features mirrored sides, which US-based architecture studio Morphosis, led by Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne, claims will help it blend into its mountainous rural surroundings.
"As much as possible, the hotel is a minimalist act that re-iterates the site and offers to the viewer a mirrored, refracted perspective of the landscape,"Mayne told Dezee.com.
"The tower's reflective skin and slender profile camouflage with the landscape, abstracting and displacing the valley and sky. The combination of one-room-per-floor and a narrow floor-plate afford exclusive panoramic views of the Alps."
Due for completion in 2019, the tower could become the world’s tallest building wholly used as a hotel, overshadowing the current record holder, the JW Marriott Marquis in Dubai.
And there is a Dubai connection to the Vals project. Remo Stoffel, the owner of the Vals spa and the Swiss entrepreneur behind the proposed hotel, is also chairman of Dubai-based facilities management company Farnek.
Stoffel said Dubai’s cityscape has inspired him. “I travel to Dubai on a regular basis and I am always amazed at how quickly the city grows and what it has achieved. It is now home to the busiest airport in the world, tallest tower, tallest hotel, the largest shopping mall, largest man-made island; the list goes on,” he told ArabianBusiness.com.
“Last year it welcomed around 12 million overnight visitors and is now planning to accommodate 20 million visitors by 2020. That inspired me to realise my own vision, by forming 7132 Ltd, commissioning this stunning design, which will be built in my home town of Vals within four years.”
But the tower, which will reportedly cost around 200m Swiss francs (£135m), has come in for some strong criticism.
"Skyscrapers in the Alps are an absurdity," said Vittorio Lampugnani, Professor of Architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, earlier this month.
There is no need to accommodate people in such a small space in the mountains, he said.
"It's marketing," Benedict Loderer, an architecture critic, told Basler Zeitung newspaper, adding that he did not believe the project would come to fruition.
The project still has to get planning permission before it can go ahead. Under Switzerland's system of direct democracy, it will be put to a vote of local citizens in the autumn.
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