hotel Europa

The project „Hotel Europa“ was conpleted in 1999 by Andrew Phelps and Wolfgang Thaler  www.mepyuk.com

For decades, the Hotel Europa was considered a “disgrace” to the Salzburg cityscape because it disrupted the classical views of the old-towns' skyline. The gradual establishment of pedestrian zones in the city center led to the separation of the urban experience in Salzburg into two extremes:
A pictorial structuring of the inner-city, in contrast to the outer-lying districts becoming systems of transportation with few points of orientation. Through the decades, this lack of orientation was compensated through the strong presence of the old-town. Today, the Hotel Europa is an irreplacable element in the make-up of not only the district around the train station, but also in the urban landscape of Salzburg.

In the mid 1950‘s, as Austria experienced a boom in the construction of high-rise buildings, limited in most regions to apartment and office structures, the tourism dependent city of Salzburg’s first high-rise was a 16 story hotel.

Though modern for Salzburg’s standards, the Hotel Europa was an attempt to keep up with international, contemporary architectural trends. In contrast, the Salzburg Congressional House, erected at the same time and demolished in 1998/99, is an example of a typically subdued modernism in Salzburg. The combination of plain concrete structures with historical elements shows the ambivalence between the progressive attitude of reconstruction, and the awareness of tradition, almost to the point of being superficial.

Hotel Europa text in german
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See more in the released book
Hotel Europa
Details for the book