And up is exactly where Barcelona architect, Xavier Claramunt, has set his sights for his next major project: an orbital hotel that, for €3 million, will offer its guests 15 sunrises a day and the opportunity to make love in a zero-gravity environment. The Galactic Suite may offer only modest accomodations by the standards of expensive hotels, but like those early explorers who pushed outward in hollowed-out tree trunks, Claramunt plans to venture into the threshold of space by tapping into a nascent, yet burgeoning, industry known as Space Tourism.
The Galactic Suite, which anticipates receiving its first guests in 2012, will look like white grapes bunched on a vine, consisting of interconnected modules, seven by four metres, with port windows. Guests will manoeuver or anchor themselves using velcro suits against carpeted walls. The package includes transportation to a Caribbean island facility for eight weeks of training, launch from the same facility to an altitude of 450 kilometres, and three nights’ stay, during which guests will circle the globe every 80 minutes. “As of today, we have 18 reservations,” Claramunt told Metropolitan in September.
Claramunt’s firm, L’EQUIP, is a self-described multi-disciplinary office, which combines architecture, interior design, industrial processes and jewellery. Winner of a Contract World prize for its work on Hotel Chic & Basic on Carrer Princesa, they are no strangers to cutting-edge projects. An undersea hotel off the coast of Alicante is also currently in development. Another project in the works is the Flamenco Towers, an impossible-looking set of inhabited, twisting structures. Inspired by the flamenco dance, they will tower 220 metres above the city of Hangzhou, China. Claramunt, by his own report, is absorbed in his work, pulling 14-hour days, seven days a week. The basic philosophy behind his projects seems always to be: think big, then settle on what’s possible.
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