Program
Extension of hotel wellness area
Size
45 m2
Responsibility
Architectural and technical design, put on hold after preliminary design
Client
Hotel Castell Zuoz AG, Zurich
Advisors
Bulach HTP (installations), Vic Cajacob Bauleitung (quantity survey, construction supervision), Kalberer + Partner AG (installations), Kuster AG (building physics), Edy Toscano AG (structure)
After 90 years of mixed fortune, the hotel underwent in 2004 an extensive renovation and extension by UN Studio (with project architect Olaf Gipser) and Hans-Jörg Ruch.
Situated in a narrow gap between the hotel and one of its parking decks, the task of this small project was to accommodate two new treatment rooms while adding a new quality to the hotel’s entrance façade. The architectural language of this small annex continues to address the relationship between the urban enclave of the hotel and its grandiose landscape context: while the original building constructed an intriguing scenography of the hotel as solitary castle monument, rendering its surroundings as untamed and dangerous, and the 2004 extension added an apartment building of outspoken urban identity, thus emphasizing the meanwhile achieved domestication of the mountain landscape, this project articulates architectural form as contextual mediation between patterns of culture and nature. Its roof landscape resonates with characteristics of both the hotel (window elements, entrance loggia) and the landscape (mountains). These analogies are both formal and performative, responding to concerns of daylight, snow and rainwater drainage.