Controversy over plan to build Europe's tallest hotel in small Swiss mountain village

The owner of a thermal spa in Vals, a mountain village in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland, has sparked controversy with a proposal to build the tallest skyscraper in Europe to house a luxury hotel. Remo Stoffel wants to build a 380-metre high tower, with 100 suites, designed by American Pritzker Prize winning architect Thom Mayne. Mayne has acknowledged that his Los Angeles-based firm’s design has been selected, following a competition involving eight short-listed firms.



However, the project will not be officially presented until March 25th in Zurich. But already doubts have sprung up about the feasibility of the project and whether it will get the necessary approvals. The hotel would be just 16 metres wide and 30 metres long, and would be located not far from the Therme Vals spa, itself designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, another Pritzker Prize winner. The spa, featuring slabs of local granite and a grass roof, was built in 1996 over the only thermal springs in the canton of Graubünden, in the eastern part of Switzerland.

But critics have already lined up against the project to build a tower that would dwarf the current tallest building in Switzerland, Zurich’s Prime Tower (126 metres) and the Roche Tower under construction in Basel that will top out at 178 metres. In general, “skyscrapers built in the Alps are an absurdity,” Vittorio Lampugnani, architecture professor at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich said. "In the Alpine landscape there is no need to accommodate so many people in such a confined space", Lampugnani, an Italin architect, said.



The project is earmarked for a rural village with a population of around 1,000. But Stoffel and Vals quarry entrepreneur Pius Truffer reportedly have plans to make Vals an architectural mecca. “I know we are reaching for the stars,” Truffer said. “We want to build one of the five best hotels in the world.” The hotel would target wealthy businessmen from Asia and the Middle East, prepared to pay anywhere from 1,000 Swiss francs (£675, $1,000) to 25,000 francs (£17,000, $25,000) a night. The project will be subject to a vote of citizens in the village in the autumn.