Vienna, Austria
Program: An 18-story, 570,487-square-foot hotel with 182 rooms, 9 conference rooms, a fitness club, a top-floor restaurant with panoramic views, retail space, and five levels of below-ground parking.
Design concept and solution: Rather than design a rectilinear tower, the architects imagined the Vienna Sofitel as an abstract volume of tilting planes of glass. They gave the structure—which is concrete for the building's first five stories and a mix of steel and concrete for the remainder—a trapezoidal footprint. With a mix of gray, black, white, mirrored, and transparent glass, the facade produces a dynamic range of reflections. The five-story base of the tower forms a strong diagonal, its roof sloping down and cutting away from the tower to reveal, through a wedgelike expanse of transparent glass, an illuminated fabric ceiling printed with an abstract design in kaleidoscopic colors, by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. Another Rist ceiling adorns the restaurant on the top floor, which is also faced in wraparound clear glass, so that the glowing ceiling appears to lift away from the tower below. To set off the bright colors of Rist's artworks, the architects selected a simple interior palette of black, white, and gray—including granite floors for the public areas—mixed with lots of mirrors and transparent glass.
Completion Date: December 2010
Total construction cost: €140 million
Owner: UNIQA Praterstrasse Projekterrichtungs GmbH
Location: Praterstrasse 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria
Architect:
Ateliers Jean Nouvel
10, cité d’Angoulême
75011 Paris, France
Tel : 33.1.49.23.83.83
Fax : 33.1.43.14.81.15
