Ower Ower Lodge In Listed Tower

The Casino Tower on the Moselle in Luxembourg is a listed national monument that was to be opened to tourists. The project of a tower within a tower allows appropriate access, a bathroom, a kitchen and contemporary technology to be brought inside without mutilating the historic structure. The inserted tower is built from 12-millimetre solid steel, welded on site, and acts at once as structure and as the main body of the new interior. Because the internal space is extremely limited, the designers distribute the programme across four floors, arranging traffic, rooms and services with extreme economy. The tower contains full heating, water and power systems, together with a bathroom, kitchen, office space, stove and, fitting the local context, a wine refrigerator. A central circulation core organises the four levels, alongside which sit office, kitchen, stair and window spaces; openings are cut carefully into both the stairwell and the rooms to bring light into the thin shell. Material details, ground- to third-floor plans and section diagrams show the precision with which the new steel core is nested inside the listed stone shell, and the hand drawings and axonometric illustrate the design's commitment to keeping the intervention legible yet reversible. The result is a habitable tourist cabin inserted into a historic monument, in which a modern, welded steel body is read as a second tower, cleanly housed within the original fortification.