The Engadin-based Hotel Castell was designed by Nikolaus Hartmann Jr. in 1913 in the wake of emerging alpine tourism that redefined radically the cultural perception of the Swiss Alps. What had been known for centuries to travelers as hostile passage zone between Middle and Southern Europe became in the second half of the 19th century an aesthetic landscape charged with entirely different values. As part of a wider cultural redefinition of the notion of nature in reaction to the problematic modernization of the city during industrialization, the mountains became a destination for new forms of health and sport travelers, anticipating the post-war mass tourism of the 20th century.

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.