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ONLINE RESERVATION
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Hotel - Architecture
The Hotel Castell ’s architecture has been shaped by three great architects. In 1912/13, Nicolaus Hartmann laid the foundation, including the Castell’s characteristic tower.
The recent renovation and remodeling bears the signatures of UN Studio Amsterdam (Chesa Chastlatsch, hamam, half of the rooms) and Ruch Architektur St.Moritz (half the rooms).
Additional splashes of color were contributed in 1998 by architect Gabrielle Hächler and artist Pipilotti Rist with their «Red Bar» and by Tadashi Kawamata with his delicate sunbathing terrace (across from the «Red Bar»).
The Architects
Nicolaus Hartmann Junior
The buildings of St.Moritz architect Nicolaus Hartmann Jr. (1880–1956) played a significant and respected role in 20th-century Swiss architecture. His Bündner Heimatstil «Grisons style» influenced the architecture in the tourist centers of the Engadine and canton Grisons throughout a whole century of economic and political prosperity.
Hartmann, a representative of the regional preservation movement throughout his life, consciously turned back to regionally typical, traditional styles of building using local materials and solid craftsmanship.
After hotels, the Rhaetian Railway was Hartmann’s largest client. He also did a variety of restoration work in castles and palaces. Besides the Castell, his most important work in the Engadine includes the Hotel La Margna in St.Moritz, the Alp Grüm railway station, the Giovanni Segantini memorial which was sensitively restored in 1998/99 by Hans-Jörg Ruch, the Engadiner Museum, the church in St.Moritz-Bad, the Alpenrose in Sils and the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz.
www.hartmann-bau.ch
UN Studio, Amsterdam
They built the Erasmus bridge, Rotterdam’s new landmark, and delighted the world of architecture with the «Möbius House» in Het Gooi. A great deal of publicity surrounded their suggestion, in cooperation with United Architects, of hydra-like intertwined towers for Ground Zero. The new Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart and the Chesa Chastlatsch on the slope above Zuoz were both built by them.
Led by Ben van Berkel and his wife Caroline Bos, UN Studio has established itself internationally and van Berkel himself is on the way from star to superstar. For him, building in the classic sense is over and done with. «Today it’s about aesthetics, principles, and the inner values of architecture – organization of rooms, atmosphere, movement. It’s about how we can use all our knowledge to best meet people’s needs».
www.unstudio.com
Ruch Architektur, St.Moritz
Numerous exceptional renovations and new buildings in the Engadine carry the same signature, that of Hans-Jörg Ruch. With a great deal of feeling he maneuvers contrasts into a relationship of balanced tension, building vacation homes, banks, a library, hotels, consumer temples, an electricity substation and even a SAC mountain hut.
The artificial and stylistically impure are an atrocity to this widely traveled, cosmopolitan architect. Even in his choice of materials, Hans-Jörg Ruch restricts himself to raw cement and iron, glass, one kind of wood, one kind of stone. «Less is more, more is already too much».
www.ruch-arch.ch |
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