Antoni Gaudí’s Unbuilt 1908 Manhattan Hotel Revived Through AI Visualizations
In 1908, renowned Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí designed an extraordinary hotel called "Hotel Attraction" intended to rise 360 meters in downtown Manhattan, New York. This grandiose project was envisioned as the tallest and most spectacular hotel in the United States, possibly the world, featuring nine organically shaped spires inspired by Gaudí’s famous Sagrada Família. The hotel was planned as a "vertical city" with five massive halls representing different continents, six floors of restaurants, theaters, galleries, and a vast interior space nearly 125 meters high called "Homage to America," which included a 10-meter Statue of Liberty replica and a star-shaped observation deck named the "Space Tower."
The hotel was commissioned by two anonymous American businessmen seeking an exclusive playground for New York’s elite. However, the project was never realized. Various reasons are suggested: the design was deemed overly ambitious or technically unfeasible for its time, Gaudí fell ill in 1909, and his commitment to completing the Sagrada Família took precedence. A popular theory claims Gaudí, a devout man with strong social ideals, rejected the idea of building a hotel solely for the wealthy elite and abandoned the project on principle.
Much of Gaudí’s work on the hotel was lost due to his unconventional methods, he rarely made detailed plans, preferring clay and wire models, and the destruction of his workshop during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The hotel’s designs nearly vanished until Joan Matamala, a sculptor and Gaudí’s close collaborator’s son, reconstructed the plans from memory and surviving sketches. In 1956, Matamala published a detailed report revealing the project’s story and drawings, which experts later verified as authentic Gaudí work.
Exactly 100 years after Gaudí’s death, Belgian artist Thierry Lechanteur used advanced artificial intelligence to bring these lost sketches to life with vivid, poetic visualizations. His AI-generated images offer a breathtaking glimpse of what New York’s skyline might have looked like had Gaudí’s visionary hotel been built, blending the organic architectural language of Gaudí with the city’s skyscraper landscape.
