"(The hotel) is one of the rare standing testimonies of the brutalist movement in North Africa. [...] Hôtel du Lac was built as an expression of Tunisia's modernity and independence. In contrast to the surrounding architecture, the hotel makes a rebellious statement of departure from both traditional and colonial architectural forms." — CNN
This local landmark of Tunis has made quite an impact on the public since its initial opening in 1973. Said to be the inspiration behind a fictional Sandcrawler vehicle in George Lucas' Star Wars films, the Hôtel du Lac also acts as "one of Tunisia's premier brutalist structures" in North Africa. The building was designed by Italian architect Raffaele Contigiani, who was also known for his commissioned works on various pavilions and fairs as well as other hotels around North Africa. The Hôtel du Lac was Contigiani's most known work.
The ten-floor hotel features 416 rooms which were known to host high profiled guests and A-List clientele. However, in 2002, the hotel closed its doors to the public. Since its closing, the building has remained empty, slowly deteriorating. The once bustling venue attracts several onlookers due to its interesting upside-down pyramid shape and sawtoothed edges. For years the build's future was uncertain. After it was sold to Lafico, a government-owned investment fund from Libya, by former Tunisia President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 thoughts of redeveloping the site were in discussion. In February of this year, the announcement of the hotel's demolition sparked a significant response from the public. Soon preservationists and architecture enthusiasts launched petitions to save the historic brutalist building.
Redevelopment plans are in the works, according to hired site consultant architect Sahby Gorgi twelve plan options are under consideration. Gorgi shares that the new owners of the building are well aware of the hotel's status and symbolic meaning. However, despite the public's strong opinion it will be hard to declare if the building can be saved. The struggle for building preservation has become even more difficult now with the Tunisian government's recent bill which would allow for old buildings to be demolished faster. Architect and activist Sami Aloulou of the conservation group Edifices et Memoires (Buildings and Memories), "The authorities have started a campaign aiming to demolish what they consider as old, dangerous, and worthless buildings without even consulting the experts." Thoughts of how the building will receive a "second life" will be revealed in the coming months.
29 Comments
Save it!..It is so 1973!
so good
That is one ugly pile.
Brilliant.
Love it.
The inevitable result of prioritizing novelty over building a humane and sustainable environment. Originality is not a prerequisite for quality.
In other words, if it doesn't have Greco-Roman flourishes, fuck it.
It's a goddamn hotel They're not humane, never have been. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Come on Sneaky, you know better. It don't have to be roman or whatever. Just another neat-o move that's supposed to make up for yet another grid facade. If you had to preserve each and every one of these one-liner buildings because no body had done it before, you'd be saving all sorts of garbage. Good riddance.
I'm not stating if it should be preserved or not, that isn't up to me. But you don't get any cookies for using hyperbole to attack the architecture. Classical architecture had rules and rigidity, too.
Sorry Pete, I was responding to the efforts to save the building. It does however hover menacingly with no sense of scale, so yes it's a little inhumane, and the aesthetics are gimmicky and ephemeral so yes, a bit unsustainable too. But you're right, Classicism can be rigid... if the practitioner is also rigid. As an eclectic pluralist, I'm not averse to experimentation at all, I just think this building fails on many levels. If you disagree, cool, but I'm not a reactionary classicist just because I happen to think this building sucks. Can I have my cookie now?
Chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin?
Awesome!
You gotta love the big "F you" to the laws of physics. Take that, gravity!
I wonder if the hotel management had to balance out room assignments on upper floors? ("No more guests in the south wing until the north wing starts to fill up!")
"It’s A Great brutalist building in the wrong place and time.
That's an amazing piece of Brutalist sculpture, would love to see the interior of those wings.
Stairways.
I love it, but I’m a big fan of brutalist architecture in general...
I may be one of the few people on this post that have actually been to Tunisia, and have seen this building. It’s a wonderful piece of architecture.
If it is so wunderbar why is it sitting empty? The preservationists that come out of the woodwork when one of these train-wrecks is scheduled for its just reward always seem willing to place the costs of rehab/maintenance/refurbishment squarely on the backs of the taxpayers either directly or through tax breaks to a developer who promises miracles that invariable go 'poof'. Think of it as a ruble factory and be done with it.
usually these kind of transactions and redevelopment have a lot more to do with political opportunities or exploitation of zoning regulations than any shortcomings of the architecture. penn station wasn't demolished because it was a bad train station. it just got in the way of more profitable buildings at a time when the owner's primary business was shutting down. i suspect the old boston city hall has been protected through tax breaks and zoning obstructions too - as it should be. lot's of buildings are worth saving, even when they obstruct upzoning.
Here is Boston's Old City Hall, repurposed, which although built in 1865 may outlast the current brutalist inverted ziggurat built 100 years later.
That depends on how much sea levels will rise, Old City Hall is quite close to the floodplain ;-)
there's a wicked irony in suggesting that the default state of architecture in Tunis should be greco-roman classical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Punic_War
And European Brutalist Modernism is better...why?
It's apparently what they chose after being liberated from Colonialism, what's wrong with that?
Just like students choose modernism in school? Yokay.
What Tunisia has is Islamic Middle Eastern with a large dose of French Colonial architecture. It is apparently what they want to go back to. Can't imagine why.
You better get than Greco-Roman-Renaissance-Beauxarts-Belle Epoch bullshit out of ma face! Come think of it, isn't that what Vitruvius said about that Greek Imperialist style ?-}
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