Piz Gloria
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 a Bernese architect, Konrad Wolf. The restaurant claims to be the world's highest revolving restaurant.
Because of the difficult conditions, construction units had to be prefabricated to a large extent. The outer skin of the all-round glass upper floor consists of aluminium-designed wooden plates, originally an aluminum-coated tent roof. There is a turning mechanism so that all guests have views: around a core of 12 m diameter, a 3 m annulus takes approximately one hour to complete one rotation.
The panoramic restaurant is considered a pioneering achievement in tourist buildings, bearing witness to the spirit of the time of the 1960s. The mountain restaurant was enlarged around 1990 to hold approximately 400 diners, but kept its original character.
In the James Bond novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Blofeld's hideout was a mountain-top building named Piz Gloria. The movie found the Schilthorn building part-way through its construction, and contributed financially to completion of the restaurant in return for having exclusive use during filming. The restaurant retained the name of the James Bond location, and to this day acknowledges the significant contribution to its reputation with a James Bond exhibition in the lower floor of the building, showing clips from the film.
