The demolition of Hotel du Lac in Tunis, a brutalist icon of the 1970s

There may be a new entry on the ever-growing list of lost icons. The Hotel du Lac in Tunis has long been a social media blockbuster for brutalist architecture – which, over the past decade, has become almost a genre of its own online. Like many of the other names on that infamous list, the hotel occupies a key place in the story of its country. The 1960s were the years of post-French Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba, a time when new independence was expressed in symbolic form. The hotel went a step further: the foreign architect brought in was no longer French but Italian. Raffaele Contigiani, a Roman with roots in Turin, accepted the commission in the early 1970s after already completing significant work abroad. On the shore of Tunis lake he produced a shape that quickly became iconic, an inverted stair with ever bolder overhangs as the floors rise, a form also reducing the footprint on unstable ground near the lake.

The building, as an icon, was a source of inspiration. A few years after it opened, George Lucas arrived in the area to film the opening sequences of the 1977 first legendary Star Wars film A New Hope. The filming site is now a UNESCO property and some had hoped the same recognition might come for the hotel. Moreover, the resemblance between the hotel form and the film vehicle known as the Sandcrawler is striking, though the similarity has always been described as accidental. Lucas stayed at the Hotel du Lac. James Brown stayed there too. Decades of success followed but the hotel closed in the early 2000s and then declined for twenty years. The property was bought by a real estate group based in Libya.

As often happens with endangered icons, efforts to save the hotel were followed by a rapid and explosive sequence of announcements and denials about its immediate future. In June 2024 a conservative renovation project was even presented. Still, in on August 15, 2025 the architect and researcher Amira Belhaj Hlali reported that demolition had begun, triggering a large social mobilization and immediate denials from subjects being called out. Five days later, demolition works were confirmed and local authorities described the building as being in a “catastrophic state”, as an “imminent danger that made a legal verdict for its demolition necessary”.

A new cultural and tourist center is planned, with a new hotel that will create more than four hundred jobs in the hospitality field. The developer gave vague statements saying the new architecture will be inspired by the existing building. As of September 2025, updates have gone quiet and demolition is expected to be completed and new construction to begin in the first quarter of 2026. What cannot be stopped, especially in Italy, is the single image that will keep coming to mind whenever Franco Battiato sings about crowded hotels in Tunis for summer holidays (“pieni gli alberghi a Tunisi / per le vacanze estive”). That image is the giant inverted steps of the Hotel du Lac, rising into the hot sky above the city.

Opening image: Photo Jamie Barras from Flickr