While India's Park Hotel group has forged a reputation over its 44-year history for boutique luxury establishments, its brazenly sculptural, 270-room hotel in Hyderabad is the first it has built from scratch.
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
Program: A five-story, 347,125-square-foot hotel with a total of 246 guest rooms, 66 residential apartments, a presidential suite, a basement spa and pool, and retail space. The project, which backs up onto the Eurostar train station, is a restoration and expansion of a 19th-century Victorian Gothic railway hotel designed by George Gilbert Scott. A new five-story wing on the west side of the site contributes the majority (189) of the bedrooms. Design concept and solution: RHWL and Richard Griffiths wanted to restore the interiors and highlight the building's details with minimal interference, and to integrate the new wing naturally into
Drawing on the simple forms and pure shapes of minimalist art, Andersson-Wise Architects conceived this Texas hotel as a narrow tower defined by light and shadow.
A six-story, 120,000-square-foot mixed-use building that houses Pratt Institute's digital arts department and the digital arts lab; student services, including the admissions and financial aid offices; the nonprofit housing advocacy group Pratt Center for Community Development; and a natural foods supermarket on the ground floor.
When architect John Galen Howard mapped a Beaux-Arts plan for the University of California, Berkeley campus in the early 20th century, one of the first buildings erected in its spirit was Durant Hall—a two-story steel-framed structure completed in 1911 and wrapped in granite along classical lines.