Piz Gloria
Piz Gloria is the name of the revolving restaurant on the Schilthorn near Mürren in the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland. The aerial tramway station and the restaurant were built by the Bernese architect, Konrad Wolf. The Piz Gloria restaurant claims to be the world's first revolving restaurant, [1] although others already existed, such as the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., which opened during the Century 21 Exposition of the 1962 World's Fair in that country. [2]
Given the difficult topographic and climatic conditions, construction units were prefabricated. The outer skin of the glass circular upper floor is of aluminium-skinned wooden panels, that originally was an aluminum-coated tent roof. The rotative mechanism — a 12m-diametre core with a 3.0m annulus completely rotates the upper floor in approximately an hour —allows every guest to have a view. The Piz Gloria panoramic restaurant is a pioneer architectural achievement in tourist buildings, bearing witness to the spirit of the 1960s. In 1990, the restaurant was enlarged to accommodate some 400 diners, and retained its original architectural character.
The Piz Gloria restaurant originated in the Ian Fleming James Bond novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963),wherein the hideout of the villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, is Piz Gloria, a mountain-top building containing an allergies investigation clinic. The movie production team found the restaurant partly constructed, and financially contributed to its completion in return for exclusive use for filming the eponymous movie (1969), where the building is shown quite prominently. Afterwards, the restaurant retained the Piz Gloria name of the film location, and currently acknowledges its significant contribution to its commercial reputation; it features a James Bond exhibition (memorabilia and film clips) in the lower floor.
Moreover, the world's highest, revolving restaurant is the Metro-Alpin restaurant at 3,500m (11,483ft.) atop of the Saas-Fee gondola lift. The Piz Gloria atop of the Schilthorn over Mürren is 2,970m (9,744ft.); Switzerland has a newer, third revolving restaurant, the Le Kuklos, above Leysin in canton Vaud.