In 1908, Antoni Gaudí envisioned a grand hotel to be built in Lower Manhattan. The design for the Hotel Attraction, developed by the Catalan architect, would have stood out among the rigid grid of New York City’s skyscrapers both for its dizzying height—it was supposed to exceed 300 meters—and for its organic forms, which were entirely different from the boxy shapes of the Big Apple’s buildings. It was never built. In fact, it was forgotten and only rediscovered when the sculptor Joan Matamala i Flotats, an apprentice in the Sagrada Família workshop, published the drawings in 1956.
Lechanteur has created a plausible hypothesis based on his interpretation, without aiming to faithfully reconstruct something that, after all, existed only in the architect’s imagination.
A hotel like a vertical city
The hotel was to have nine towers: a taller central tower and eight structures built around it in a recognizable Gaudí-style design. In addition to all the spaces necessary for it to function as a hotel, the building was to include theaters, galleries, and restaurants. The project has resurfaced several times throughout the city’s history, such as in 2003, when one of the proposals for the redevelopment of Ground Zero suggested using that design as the basis for a new building.
It has also resurfaced in pop culture: in the TV series *Fringe*, the Hotel Attraction appears in a parallel universe’s New York, where Gaudí’s design did not remain on paper but was actually built. A sort of perfect narrative foreshadowing for a building that, even today, continues to exist primarily as a hypothesis, an alternative vision, and a missed opportunity.
The Return of a Project That Was Never Built
The Hotel Attraction is back in the news these days, in the year marking the centennial of the great architect’s death, which has also been celebrated through major events that have made headlines around the world in recent months: from the blessing of the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família, after more than 140 years of construction, to the posthumous attribution of the Xalet del Catllaràs, one of the rare works associated with Gaudí that lies outside the more well-known paths of his body of work.
Today, once again, the Hotel Attraction is brought back to life thanks to a project by Belgian artist Thierry Lechanteur, who, using digital tools and AI, has envisioned the grand building by studying the drawings and interpreting them through the materials and techniques favored by Gaudí. Since this was a project that Gaudí himself never fully developed, Lechanteur has created a plausible hypothesis based on his own interpretation, without aiming to faithfully reconstruct something that, after all, existed only in the architect’s imagination, giving life to a possible but never-realized vision.
“You know how much I love Gaudí,” the artist wrote when posting the AI-generated photos of the Hotel Attraction. “Through these images, I wanted to pay tribute to him on the centennial of his passing, bringing one of his most fascinating projects back to life: the Hotel Attraction, a monumental tower conceived for New York but never built. This building never existed. It remained a drawing, a vision, an unfulfilled promise. Hotel Attraction. A dream of Gaudí’s that never took shape.”