HOTEL ATTRACTION
Proposal.
Architect: Antoni Gaudi / Date: 1908 / Location: New York City.
This interesting project, never carried out, remained completely unknown till 1956, after many years of indifference -even hostility- towards Gaudi’s works. First of all it is necessary to dwell on the figure of the sculptor and gaudinist Juan Matamala Flotats (1893-1977), who divulged this project, the son of the sculptor Lorenzo Matamala Piñol (1856-1927), who married the daughter of the sculptor Juan Flotats.
Juan Matamala started working in the Sagrada Familia workshop in his youth an made the well known Gaudí bust in 1925 and also made his death mask. He gave valuable first hand data for Gaudí’s scholars. Matamala tells how, in may 1908, two North American businessmen visited the Sagrada Familia workshop (and also the works at Casa Milà, Park Güell, apart from the Güell Palace, and, previously to their trip to Barcelona, the Mallorca cathedral) to commission him a singular building: the Attraction Hotel. Gaudí had even planned to travel regularly to New York to survey the works, just what he did with the restoration of Mallorca cathedral. Unfortunately we don’t know two capital things: the two commissioners names and the reason why the hotel was never built. A reasonable answer for the second question may be that the fact of erecting a building 360 metres high in 1908!, when there weren’t in New York any buildings with those dimensions, it should have been a very expensive enterprise. The hotel consisted in a higher central core with the shape of a revolving paraboloid crowned by a star, that was flanked at the cardinal points by four lesser buildings intended to be museums, art galleries and concert halls, and being very similar to the Milá House façade, that was being built at that time. Five large superimposed dining rooms were intended, some 70-85 metres high, that would represent the five Continents. The first one, in the first floor, was dedicated to America. The building was crowned by the Homage to America room, that was 125 metres high, namely one third of the total height of the hotel.
(words from Here)
