Never BornARCHITECTURE

Hotel Attraction

Antoni Gaudí designed a 360-metre hotel for New York decades before such a tower could be engineered or financed.

HOW CLOSE TO REALITY45/100
CATEGORYArchitecture
LIFECYCLE1908
00

Quick facts

Existence state
Never Born
Peak stage
detailed preproduction
Research confidence
medium
Last verified
01

What it was

A highly ambitious New York hotel and entertainment complex attributed to Antoni Gaudí.

The project centred on a vast parabolic tower with themed halls and an observation space. Surviving drawings and later reconstructions suggest a proposal radically taller and more sculptural than contemporary skyscrapers.

02

Existence timeline

New York proposal

A monumental hotel scheme is developed for Manhattan.

Tower composition drawn

Parabolic masses, public halls and a central tower are recorded.

Commission lapses

The project does not progress to construction documents or a site build.

Drawings re-emerge

Project material becomes known through Gaudí's collaborators and archives.

Museum reinterpretation

Never Built New York places the hotel in a public archive of unrealised city plans.

03

Why it ended

The commission never progressed to an executable New York building and no construction began.

04

Last confirmed trace

Drawings associated with the project and scholarly reconstructions preserve the design, though parts of its commissioning history remain debated.
05

What it left behind

Hotel Attraction has become a durable image of an alternate Manhattan and of Gaudí working at a scale never realised in his lifetime.

06

How we classified it

The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.

The strongest verified milestone maps to detailed_preproduction under Arrival Score V1.

07

Sources & verification

Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.

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