A Tall Tale? Record-Setting Luxury Hotel Is Proposed for Tiny Swiss Town
A rendering of the proposed 7132 Hotel in Vals, Switzerland, population 1,000. It would be as tall as the Empire State Building. (Morphosis Architects)
This may sound like an April Fool’s joke, and if it comes down to a vote, it may end up as an elaborate publicity stunt. But for now, plans have been in the works for months to build a thin, shiny luxury hotel in a tiny town in the Swiss Alps that would be the tallest building in western Europe.
We joke you not about the promotional release that explains what the 7132 Hotel in Vals, Switzerland, would accomplish: “1,000 residents, 1,000 sheep and 1,000 hotel beds. This magical ratio is the secret of the relaxed atmosphere in the Vals valley.”
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The architects of the proposed monolith to luxury tourism are Morphosis, led by Thom Mayne. The hotel would reach 1,250 feet high – that’s more feet than residents in Vals – and according to the Telegraph, rooms would sell from $1,000 to $24,000 per night. There would be 107 guest rooms, high-end dining, a sky bar, spa and more. It would cost $313 million to build and would surpass London’s Shard (1,014 feet) as the tallest building in the European Union.
Vals is a quiet spa town in the Alps, about a two-hour train ride from Zurich. It’s home to the Peter Zumthor-designed Thermal Baths that won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2009. It would be architectural sacrilege for critics of 7132 to place a brash building like that alongside the Baths.
The luxury hotel would feature a restaurant, sky bar, and spa. (Morphosis Architects)
The target date to open the hotel is 2019, but first it has to be approved by local voters, which is no sure thing. Bloomberg Business notes that in 2012, Swiss voters approved a ban on building new vacation homes in the Alps. In 2013, locals in Vals’ canton of Graubuenden rejected a proposal to bid for the 2022 Winter Olypmics.
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Some have dubbed the project a publicity stunt, and one writer for the Guardian calls it a “gigantic mirror-clad middle finger aimed at the region; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more obnoxious gesture to inflict on a sleepy spa town.”
If the building ever gets made, one of its rooms would look like this. (Morphosis Architects)
Architecture critic Benedict Loderer told Basler Zeitung newspaper that the project is merely “marketing … It’s a question of the skyscraper’s position. If you put it in a valley, that’s relatively meaningless.”
The hand-wringing over the project, which launched last year, intensified in February, when the five jurors picked to select a winning design for the hotel walked out before choosing one. They cited “important questions unanswered” in a statement that was translated to English in Architect’s Journal. But plans moved ahead until the recent design unveiling.
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