Hotel Cosmos

The chessboard pattern across the eighteen-storey facade of the Cosmos Hotel on Constantin Negruzzi Boulevard is produced by alternating window bays with and without balconies, a simple device that gives the tower an immediately recognisable silhouette at the junction where Negruzzi and Cantemir Boulevards diverge. B. Banykin and I. Kolbayeva, a team from Leningrad, completed it in 1983 after a design and construction process that stretched over a decade. Ironically, the building's name and neon star logo were the only concessions to the cosmic theme that dominated Soviet design culture at the time of its conception: the architecture itself makes no reference to space. At the top of the tower, a café volume with broad windows and an asymmetrically tilting canopy roof provides a panoramic view of the city. The elongated ground and first floor volume housing the lobby, restaurant, and a formerly popular boulevard bar projects beyond the tower footprint, its glazed facade marked by four incised accents. In 2002 a shopping centre annex called the Grand Hall was added to one side of the complex, expanded further in 2011, and the combined visual effect now makes it difficult to read the hotel as a separate architectural object. The hotel was privatised and sold to a new owner in 2011 following economic difficulties. A decision to demolish the Cosmos Hotel in 2026 has since been announced, and a campaign to prevent demolition is currently under way.