Hotel Attraction - Gaudí in New York
2026
In 1908, Antoni Gaudí was commissioned to design a hotel in Lower Manhattan. It would have been a 360-meter tower with restaurants, a theater, exhibition galleries, and an observation level near the summit. It would have been the tallest building in the world. The original drawings were lost in the bombing of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and the project remained unknown for decades. What survives is a small set of sketches and reconstructions that have circulated through Gaudí scholarship since the 1950s. The Hotel Attraction belongs to an older idea of the tower as monument. It is a symbolic structure before a commercial one. Over the 20th century, this typology disappeared, and the skyscraper became office space, then corporate identity, then capital. This study takes the drawings as a starting point and imagines how the building would have sat on a Lower Manhattan block. The images are speculative interpretations.
Further reading: Montaner, J.M. & Azara, P. Hotel Attraction: una catedral laica / El rascacielos de Gaudí en New York. UPC/ETSAB, 2003.
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