OOIIO proposes 'frame hotel' on Peruvian cliff

Impossibly named Spanish architecture practice's Unbalance Hotel responds to brief from Lima promoter

When we think of hollow squares in an architectural sense (and we're not afraid to admit that we do - quite often, in fact) it’s usually Rem Koolhaas’s unfeasible headquarters for China Centre Television in Beijing that first springs to mind. However, the CCTV Building (nicknamed the underpants by some locals) may one day have a young relation, perched on a clifftop overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The improbably-named Madrid-based practice OOIIO Architecture  has proposed a similarly geometrically challenged building as a hotel and congress centre just outside Lima. A Latin American promoter – that’s as much information as the architects will reveal – tasked them with “creating a unique, innovative and worldwide recognisable building with a moderate investment”. While the practice might achieve the first three criteria, it’s difficult to see how, given its location, the Unbalance Hotel, as it's called, could have anything but a very hefty price tag.

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It’s a rectangle with one corner partially submerged, so that it appears to perch precariously on the cliff edge. So far, so crazy, but “A hotel with these characteristics and dimensions constructed in a traditional way would be a visual barrier,” the practice points out, “so we bet on a frame-building that hosts a huge programme that could block the ocean’s view, but thanks to its peculiar shape, the landscape is now even more relevant, we have framed it!” Meaning that it’s a hollow structure.

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OOIIO envisages 125 hotel rooms, as well as the usual hospitality sector gamut of restaurants, conference rooms, meeting rooms, exhibition spaces and the like. “This hotel achieves an extra profitability due to the surprising, interesting and original design,” they predict. This is the second of OOIIO’s recent proposals for the 8m-strong Peruvian capital, and follows on from their almost as eye-catching Miraflores-Barranco footbridge.

You can see an array of equally audacious and innovative structures that made it through to completion by checking out both the Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century Architecture and 20th-Century World Architecture.

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