118-year-old NYC skyscraper’s interiors finally visualized—See inside

A long-lost New York City skyscraper envisioned by Antoni Gaudí more than a century ago has been given new life through a series of detailed visualizations, including its surreal interiors, that reveal what may have been one of the most extraordinary buildings ever conceived.

Journalist and architectural enthusiast Daniel Coughlin has recreated Hotel Attraction, an unbuilt Manhattan tower reportedly commissioned in 1908 by two unidentified American businessmen for Gaudí to design. Hotel Attraction is among the several unrealized urban projects that Coughlin has recreated on his YouTube channel, The Curious Compendium of Architectural What-Ifs.

While previous depictions have largely focused on the tower’s striking exterior, Coughlin’s latest work also explores the vast ceremonial halls, themed cultural spaces, and monumental chambers that were planned inside.

If built, the imposing structure would have risen approximately 1,181 feet above Lower Manhattan and stood as the world’s tallest building for decades, only to be surpassed by the Empire State Building in the 1930s.

The renewed interest in Hotel Attraction comes during the centenary year of Gaudí’s death. The architect died on June 10, 1926, while construction continues on his most famous work, Barcelona’s Sagrada Família, more than 140 years after work first began in 1882.

Earlier this year, the church added the upper arm of a cross to the pinnacle of its Jesus Christ tower, bringing the structure to 565 feet, 11 inches. The milestone marks another significant step toward the completion of the world’s tallest church, which is expected to be finished within the next decade.

A Vertical World of Themed Halls

“I wanted to explore what Hotel Attraction might have looked and felt like standing in present-day Lower Manhattan—specifically on Church Street, not far from the Jenga Tower—rather than presenting it as a piece of science-fiction fantasy,” Coughlin told Newsweek.

He added: “The interiors were especially compelling because they reveal that it was intended to be far more than a conventional luxury hotel. It was conceived as something between a hotel, cultural complex, vertical city, and secular cathedral.”

According to surviving descriptions studied by Coughlin, visitors would have entered through one of four monumental entrances before arriving in a richly decorated reception hall approximately 56 feet high.

“Details are rather scant, but the building was to have four monumental entrances, with the principal entrance leading into a richly decorated reception hall approximately 17 meters/56 feet high,” Coughlin said. “Like the exterior, it would have been embellished with trencadís, Gaudí’s signature ceramic mosaic.”

Above the reception hall, Hotel Attraction was designed as a sequence of enormous themed spaces reflecting different regions of the world.

“The America Room occupied the first floor. The Europa Hall above it combined the functions of a dining room, concert hall and theater, with towering parabolic stained-glass windows and ceiling sculptures inspired by the myth of Europa,” Coughlin said, while the higher floors were devoted to Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as museums, galleries, concert halls, and leisure spaces.

The sheer variety of functions surprised him.

“Hotel Attraction wasn’t simply a tower of bedrooms and restaurants,” he said.

According to Coughlin, the lower towers featured apartments and residences, while its central structure included museums, theaters, galleries, ceremonial halls, and observation spaces, with a handful of underground floors planned for kitchens, garages, storage, and essential services.

“That combination of spectacle and infrastructure changed how I understood the building,” he added. “It was conceived as a self-contained vertical world, with visitors moving upwards from practical and earthly spaces towards increasingly ceremonial and celestial ones.”

The Tower’s Most Astonishing Room

“The most astonishing interior was the Tribute to America Room near the summit,” Coughlin said, which formed the centerpiece of Hotel Attraction.

According to his research, the chamber was envisioned as a vast hall roughly 410 feet tall, anchored by a 33-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty and surrounded by sculptures of the Founding Fathers, an American eagle, and other patriotic symbols.

For Coughlin, the room captured the ambition of the entire project.

“That immense vertical chamber stood out most to me,” he said. “Its sheer scale and theatricality would have made it feel less like a hotel interior and more like entering a secular cathedral dedicated to America.”

The broader interior scheme was equally striking. Coughlin said he was fascinated by the building’s flowing, organic architecture, with columns, arches, and ceilings blending into one another rather than appearing as separate structural elements.

The result, he suggested, would have been an environment that felt sculptural and immersive, reflecting many of the architectural principles seen throughout Gaudí’s work.

One of the most surprising discoveries during Coughlin’s research was the building’s intended exterior decoration. Rather than the smooth, pale tower seen in many modern reconstructions, Hotel Attraction was reportedly designed to be clad in trencadís, Gaudí’s signature ceramic mosaic, with colors transitioning from earthy greens and browns at the base through reds and mineral tones before fading into silvers and golds near the summit.

According to Coughlin, the color gradient was meant to symbolize a journey “from the earth towards the celestial realm.”

Gaudí’s Legacy Lives On

Although Hotel Attraction was never built, Coughlin believes it could have dramatically altered New York’s architectural identity.

He said the tower would have offered “a radically different model of the skyscraper,” replacing the rigid box-like forms that later dominated Manhattan with a tapering, organic and highly symbolic structure clad in ceramic mosaics, stained glass, sculpture and glazed domes.

While he acknowledged it is impossible to know how much influence the building would have had, Coughlin suggested it may have encouraged a more expressive and sculptural approach to high-rise design.

Had it survived to the present day, he added, Hotel Attraction would “almost certainly remain one of New York’s most recognizable landmarks” and one of the works most closely associated with Gaudí, second perhaps only to the Sagrada Família.

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Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Sirena Bergman and Anthony Murray.