The foundations were poured. The crane base was anchored. Steel rebar for the future core walls stood ready. Everything below street level for AC Hotel NoMad — Marriott's planned 26-storey, 168-room modular hotel — was in place. The building itself never rose above it.

Guest room modules were being manufactured in Poland by Skystone Modular, designed to arrive fully furnished and be lifted directly into position at a rate of eight modules per floor, over a planned 90-day erection period. It was engineered to become the tallest modular hotel in the world. Instead, it became a case study in what happens when a modular supply chain and a construction site stop moving together.

26
Storeys planned
168
Rooms planned
8/floor
Modules per storey
90 days
Planned erection period
Phase 1 — The modular premise
Built to a 90-day stacking schedule
Hotel room modules were manufactured in Poland by Skystone Modular, designed to cross the Atlantic by container ship fully furnished — beds, bedding, and toiletries included — and be lifted straight from delivery trucks into position on the tower, at night, given their oversized dimensions on Manhattan streets.
Phase 2 — Foundations complete, structure absent
Everything below grade, ready
The reinforced concrete foundation and slab were finished, steel rebar for the future inner core walls and columns was capped off and waiting, and the base of the site's tower crane was anchored — but the building never reached street level.
Phase 3 — Construction stalls
Years of an idle site
Work halted in 2020, with the site remaining empty and showing no signs of activity for years afterward — a completed foundation and an anchored crane base, waiting for a structure that wasn't coming.
Phase 4 — Financial collapse and sale
Foreclosure, then a different building entirely
Lender Avana Capital moved to foreclose on the property, claiming developer Robert Chun had defaulted on debt reported at $33 million. The parties settled, and in 2024 Chun sold the site for $30 million to Pro-H Development, which is now building a conventional condominium tower on the existing foundations instead of reviving the modular hotel.

The foundations were finished. The crane base was anchored. The modules were being built. The one thing that never happened was the building itself.

AC Hotel NoMad stands as a reference case for a distinct kind of modular construction risk: not a defect in the modules or a flaw in the stacking method, but the commercial exposure created when off-site manufacturing and on-site construction stop moving on the same timeline. The engineering of factory-built rooms was never the problem here — the site's financing was.

For further reading on modular installation methods, see Erection Engineering in Industrial Construction

Related case studies: The Clement Canopy · Ichthys LNG Modules · Wuhan Modular Hospitals

Sources: Crain's New York Business — the site's sale and the project's collapse after demolition in 2019; Bisnow — modules stranded at a Brooklyn port; Construction Junkie — the original Marriott announcement. The tower was never completed; published storey counts for the planned building vary between 26 and 27.

Frequently Asked Questions

AC Hotel NoMad was planned as a 26-storey, 168-room modular hotel for Marriott International at 842 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, designed by Danny Forster & Architecture. Guest room modules were to be manufactured in Poland by Skystone Modular, shipped across the Atlantic, and stacked at a rate of eight modules per floor over a planned 90-day erection period, which would have made it the tallest modular hotel in the world at roughly 360 feet.

Below-grade construction was substantially completed — the reinforced concrete foundation and slab were finished, steel rebar for the future core walls and columns was in place, and the base of the site's construction crane was anchored — but the building never reached street level before work stopped in 2020.

Construction halted in 2020 and the site sat idle for years. Lender Avana Capital later filed to foreclose on the property, claiming developer Robert Chun had defaulted on debt reported at $33 million; the two sides settled the case out of court.

In 2024, Robert Chun sold the site for $30 million to Pro-H Development, which is building a conventional condominium tower on the existing foundations instead of reviving the modular hotel plan.