ICEHOTEL - ROOM 'Diamond Genesis'
Architecture

Designer Antoine Weygand and architect Roland Toupet have been selected to design the room called “Diamond Genesis (room 339) by the Icehotel of Jukkasjärvi in Sweden.

Every year, they rebuild the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, a small village in northern Sweden. 100 people are involved in the construction, half of whom are teams of artists who work on the rooms (there are 47 rooms in all). With a continually built and demolished structure, Ice Hotel can become a laboratory for architecture and design.

Ice Hotel is apparently the world’s oldest hotel made of ice, and they’ve used the time wisely–perfecting a nearly industrial method of hotel making which knows how to work with a very particular material in a very particular environment. If you squint your eyes and forget that we’re dealing with frozen water, you end up seeing a very cool and futuristic construction process.

Construction generally begins in November. The ice is created by spraying large metal molds. After it has sufficiently frozen and packed into place, the molds are removed and the rooms are formed by adding walls made of blocks of ice. The blocks come from ice harvested from the river in March or April of the previous year. These are also the raw materials that visiting artists will form into custom rooms.