The 11 best Brutalist hotels in North America

This impressive 27-floor edifice shares skyline space with the Transamerica Pyramid, and includes a dramatic over-street bridge. Its rooftop pool (now removed) was the star of the first few minutes of the movie Dirty Harry. The hotel is perched at the edge of Chinatown and North Beach, two great neighborhoods for exploring, with vistas of the bay and Coit Tower.

This 29-story building is a high-rise designed by Marcel Breuer, known for Brutalist architecture and one of the Harvard Five famous for midcentury modern architecture. Part of the Marriott's Autograph Collection, the property includes historic subterranean bank vaults where you can now have a cocktail, a rooftop lounge, an indoor dog park on the 29th floor and other fun features.

The Marcel of the name is Marcel Breuer, who designed this building originally called the Pirelli Building. The unique silhouette includes a top and a bottom, almost like a rudimentary human figure with a great waistline. The hotel’s focus on sustainability is formidable; it’s received LEED Platinum certification and it’s hoped this all-electric hotel will make history as the first net-zero hotel in the U.S. It’s also on the State and National Register of Historic Places with its board-formed concrete and granite tile. Brooklyn-based Dutch East Design managed the hotel’s interior design and branding with a focus on sustainability.

This six-story Wyndham hotel was built in 1978 and renovated in 2019; it’s just a few blocks from the Aquatic Center and the Centennial Auditorium. The facade features striking curved, jutting window arches. Bonus: there’s an indoor golf dome. And interesting factoid: Saskatoon was originally founded as the proposed capital of a temperance colony, so make sure to enjoy that cocktail in the lobby!

This 100-percent solar hotel gets high marks for sustainability! Its design is a visually arresting series of stepped walls made of earth-colored brick—maybe not the concrete we expect of Brutalism, but close enough. The property consists of 14 villas with a private pool. Check out the sculptural hammam with seven chambers to bathe at different temperatures.

The first resort hotel on the island, the Mauna Kea was built in 1965 with televisions specifically left out of the guestrooms to encourage appreciation of the Kohala Coast (the hotel held out until 1995, but TVs are in rooms now). The long-sprawling building is right on the edge of white sand beaches. Check out the webcam to wish you were there now!

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This 1974 Québec City landmark consists of 21 floors arranged in an asymmetric pentagon. It’s noted for a pioneering rotary restaurant on the roof and the first panoramic elevator in the province of Quebec. Rooms on the higher floors have incredible views of the Plains of Abraham, the Saint-Laurent river, the Laurentides and the city itself.

Constructed 1971-73, this hotel was built towards the end of the Brutalist period in American architecture. The striking design includes two wings with an elevated tower where they meet that almost looks like an airport air traffic control center. The Crown Center itself is a city within a city with shops, restaurants, fountains, sculptures and another hotel. Its annual Christmas tree is taller than the tree at Rockefeller Center.

Once a 1960s Holiday Inn that turned its back (a solid blank wall nearly 40 feet high) to downtown Rochester, the Hotel Indigo now has an outdoor terrace that extends horizontally. It provides more access to daylight with tall guillotine-style windows and a retractable skylight. The browns and beiges of the stucco are now a brighter white and black. Something was lost in the transformation, but we still admire the bones.

Another Marcel Breuer design, this hotel has visual interest with its differing treatment of the stories and its placement on a stepped platform. Fun to know: the hotel is a teaching hotel, and most of the employees are students studying hospitality and tourism. We can’t help but think of the Pixies song UMass; that’s educational.

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A city landmark housed on the top two floors of the Place Bonaventure, this 1967 hotel has 2.5 acres of gardens with streams where ducks and fish live. At one point Place Bonaventure was the largest building in the world, at 3.1 million square feet. The wall bulb-outs and the varied rooflines make it almost look like a factory.