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Tubular tower

I don't know about you but I love the idea of a cylindrical hotel. Check out these designs by Swiss artist Guy Dessauges, who was fascinated by cylinders. Semi-circles, he said, have been used in architecture since the Roman times and even further back in caves. So why not circles? There have been quite a few upright cylindrical hotels, but very few that use the sideways tube as the focus of their design.

This is one of his designs for cylindrical architecture – an incredible tower of tubes that sadly has never been built. Dessauges loved the idea of vaulted ceilings, rather than flat ones, and what provided better vaults than a cylinder? He spent a good chunk of the Sixties trying to realize his dream, creating designs and making scale models…

But he finally gave up in 1969, realizing he had other responsibilities he had to tend to, and that this was work for an architect rather than an artist.

Which is a shame. We've found a couple of tube-like hotels (Hotel Everland and the fantastic Dasparkhotel) and a great tubular mobile home (the Orb), but nothing like this. Can someone please make one? RM

Via: Treehugger/Andreas Angelidakes

Images: Guy Dessauges

2008 Sep 7 3 responses. share this

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