The Way Out: 4 Underground Hotels and the Engineering That Gets You Out
Underground hotels sell the view. A reef over the bed. A quarry wall outside the window. The engineers work from a different list. Rock that moves. Water that pushes. Damp air. And one question nobody photographs: how do you get out?
This piece follows the second list. Four cases, and what made each one safe to sleep in.
Uçhisar: when the maths needs a mason
Start with the oldest answer: soft volcanic tuff, carved by hand. Uçhisar, carved into the region's highest rock, was declared a disaster zone in the 1960s and emptied with state help. Villagers took their houses apart stone by stone to build new ones. By the late 1970s it was a ruin.
Gökşin Ilıcalı found it in 1996. Work on Argos in Cappadocia began in 1997, with the architect Turgut Cansever advising from the start. After 13 years of restoration it opened in 2010 with 27 rooms. Clearing rubble turned up a monastery church thought to date from the 4th or 5th century, behind a retaining wall that partly collapsed. Under the houses ran a rock-cut water tunnel, 5.5 km long; 200 m of it is now open.
Argos architect Aslı Özbay wrote the most honest line I found for this piece. In buildings solved with mixed systems, she writes, the engineering disciplines "fall short in perception and calculation", so competent stonemasons take on "an important role" (our translation from Turkish).
Why bother with caves at all? Thermal mass. A 2019 study at the İzmir Institute of Technology logged a measured cave house cut into a fairy chimney in nearby Ürgüp, not at Argos. Inside, it held about 18°C in January and 20°C in July. Relative humidity sat around 70% and 65%. The rock does most of the temperature work. The damp is the part you manage.
Shanghai: a tower held at both ends
The InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland sits in a disused quarry in Songjiang, about 280 by 220 m and 88 m deep. Martin Jochman designed the competition-winning concept at Atkins in 2006 and finished it with his own studio, JADE+QA. It opened in November 2018: 337 rooms, two storeys above ground, 16 below, the lowest two underwater.
The cliff came first. The rock is andesite, much of it weathered, with faults on the south side. According to a 2020 paper by engineers from the builder and the design institute, the team drilled in 2,000 prestressed anchor cables, 15–35 m long, each loaded to 750–1,750 kN, plus 12,777 rock bolts and sprayed concrete. At its nearest the building is 1 m from the cliff. Their model puts the unsupported slope's safety factor in a large earthquake at 1.0, which is the edge of failure. Anchored, it's 1.4.
Then the frame. It's fixed into bedrock at the pit floor and hinged to the rim at the top. Jochman told Dezeen the biggest challenge was satisfying seismic codes for "a tall building fixed at both ends". Fire escape, flooding and rockfall made his list too.
Rangali: five metres of sea on a window
The Muraka at Conrad Maldives Rangali Island has one bedroom about 5 m under the sea. Engineer Mike Murphy of Auckland's M.J. Murphy designed the structure and the acrylic, with the architect Ahmed Saleem.
The acrylic is the headline. M.J. Murphy's project notes list a 5 m-wide arch over the bed, a 135 mm semicircular lounge window and a bathroom pane 4.8 m long, 1.9 m high and 180 mm thick. Nippura in Japan made them. The sealant cured for at least 14 days.
Then the bit nobody photographs. The 610-tonne unit was built in Singapore in three pieces, ballasted with concrete and sand weighed on load cells, shipped, and lowered onto 10 steel piles with divers guiding it. At the client's request it got a second escape route, a second cylindrical tower. Even the colours are engineering. Saleem avoided whites and bright tones because they "would reflect too much" off the acrylic.
The deepest bedroom closed
Sweden's Sala Silvermine once sold a night in what it calls the world's deepest hotel. Its hall 155 m down is heated to room temperature in a mine the operator puts at two to four degrees. Overnight stays underground stopped in 2019. In 2023, wear on the lift mast shut the 155 m level to visitors. When the lift stops, so does the level.
Ask the mason, then the modeller
Shanghai shows a finite-element model earning its fee. Uçhisar shows where models run out. Below ground, the people who read the rock and the water decide whether the room works. Masons, divers, fire engineers. Put them in the first meeting.
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