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Great hotels are spaces into which visitors can project alternative lives; places that allow us to be versions of ourselves that others don’t. How hoteliers conjure these institutions out of thin air when much of our desires lay hidden is another matter. The great hotels of the 20th century may have been built in a dawning era of media and advertising, as city populations rapidly expanded, but they were created without the market research and focus groups that the contemporary hospitality industry relies on.
As a consequence, they were often stabs-in-the-dark or the fantasies of those who built and managed them, extravagant ideas of businessmen which, when successful, tapped into the latent urges of an increasingly wealthy and dynamic urban population. Dealing in dreams, though, is a dicey business, and these unbuilt hotels showed how wild the imagining was – and how very wide of the mark it could often be.
Hotel Commonwealth, New York, US
Starrett & van Vleck (1918)
In his book Delirious New York, the famed contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas describes the original Waldorf Astoria hotel – which was destroyed in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building – as “a colossal collective salon” combining accommodation with ballrooms, dining and commerce. It became a universe in itself; dissolving distinctions between private and public life.
The Commonwealth promised this to a wider clientele who would buy shares in a miniature city containing restaurants, meeting rooms, shops and saunas. Unfortunately, the scheme was a massive fraud, with share purchases funding kickbacks to crooked real-estate vendors who assembled the plot. Insider dealers and media promoters made off with the rest.
Hotel Attraction, New York, US
Antoni Gaudí (1908)
Much has been made of a visit by two US businessmen to the office of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona in 1908, where the deeply religious Catalan architect was reportedly asked to design a hotel for Manhattan by these entrepreneurs unknown. They apparently wrested from him a proposal, known as the Hotel Attraction, but the cluster of nine skyscrapers with a central tower over 350m high was never commissioned. It’s an intoxicating idea – Gaudí’s propensity for organic forms, pushing back at the rectilinear order of New York – which re-emerges in every generation wherever architectural fantasies reside. Today, that means counterfactual sci-fi TV shows and AI-enabled Instagrams.
Rogers Lacy Hotel, Dallas, US
Frank Lloyd Wright (1946)
The great Frank Lloyd Wright was desperate to build a tower from the 1920s onwards, constantly returning to the idea. The Rogers Lacy Hotel proposal was commissioned by Dallas oilman Rogers Lacy, who wanted to give the older commercial centres on the East Coast a run for their money.
The project gave FLW an opportunity to explore how floors cantilevering off a reinforced concrete core would free the envelope of the building for decoration, continuing to refine the diaphanous curtain wall design – even after it became clear that, after the death of Lacy, construction was unlikely. Details of it emerge in the stumpier Price Tower he eventually built in Oklahoma.
The Lunar Hilton Hotel, the Moon
Conrad and Barron Hilton (1950s-1960s)
A March 1963 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine ran a profile of Conrad “Connie” Hilton which imagined astronauts landing on the Moon and, behind them, Connie Hilton “with his plans for his Lunar Hilton Hotel”. The concept was actually the brainchild of his son Barron who, when he became president of the company, fleshed it out with sketches and some props, using it primarily as publicity. Hilton junior tapped into the space race optimism and used the idea to give the company an image of innovation rather than simply hoteliers. With Jeff Bezos now offering day trips into space, hotels on the moon now seem a good deal less ridiculous than they did in the 1970s.
The Xanadu Hotel, Las Vegas, US
Martin Stern Jr (mid-1970s)
It wasn’t until Las Vegas started demolishing casinos in the 1990s that it manifested itself as a city of the imagination. A place that would do anything to keep track of popular fantasy. Architecturally, Vegas resorts ceased to be conventional rectangular shelters that relied on signage, or even buildings shaped like the service they sell. Instead, they became theme parks.
The Xanadu Hotel was the first sniff of this attitude taking over: a project that combined hotel rooms with elaborate themed environments and landscaped interiors. Xanadu’s stately pleasure dome was not decreed because, although such ideas are now common, they were still experimental in the 1970s.
Million Dollar Hotel, St Louis, US
Isaac Taylor (1906)
Hard to believe, but in 1906, St Louis was where it was at, the city still benefiting from the international attention it had received after the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games. Civic leaders believed it could go on to rival Chicago as the commercial centre of the American Midwest. The architect for the World Fair was Isaac S Taylor, who was commissioned to create a proposal that reflected these ambitions. The estimated cost of $1m was as much publicity as a financial calculation, with the price itself becoming the hotel’s identity. Sadly it was also a funding benchmark it could never achieve.
‘Edifício Mauá’ hotel extension, Petrópolis, Brazil
Oscar Niemeyer (1949/50)
Petrópolis is not an oil town but a recreational one, named after Pedro II, the last Emperor of Brazil, and summer residence of the imperial family for generations before Brazil became a republic.
The original hotel was built in the Chateauesque style, a typically North American reworking of the French Renaissance style. The combination of accommodation with casino and entertainment complex was an immediate success on its opening in 1946. Oscar Niemeyer’s proposal sought to expand on this success, but on a new site and in his sensuous brand of Modernism. Sadly, the extension became superfluous when a gambling ban across Brazil hit revenue at the hotel.
Palazzo dei Congressi and Hotel, Venice, Italy
Louis Kahn (1963)
In the 1960s, when overtourism was but a twinkle in the travel industry’s eye, the Venice government decided it needed to appeal to business travellers in addition to recreational ones. The answer, it decided, was a conference centre and hotel.
Louis Kahn was invited to design such a facility near the Arsenale, the historical complex for shipbuilding and munitions manufacture which made Venice great. Kahn’s design spanned the Canale delle Galeazze, creating an occupied bridge. The project became a lightning rod for debate between conservationists and those who would reimagine Venice as a modern city, prompting a major rethinking of what might happen to the Arsenale, which today has been conserved and reimagined as home to the Biennale, an expo site of sorts.
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