A Brief History of the Revolving Restaurant

A revolving restaurant or a spinning restaurant is usually a tower restaurant designed to sit high atop of tall buildings like hotels, communication towers, and skyscrapers that has a revolving platform on top. The building remains stationary but the platform rotates a 360-degree giving a panoramic view. The revolving restaurants are still and always will be a global craze because of its unique history and its architecture.

Know the World’s First Revolving Restaurant

In 1959, A Seattle hotel executive named Edward E. Carlson doodled the idea of a flying saucer-shaped top house building on a napkin and called it “Space Needle”. Later on August 15, 1961, with the help of John Graham, a Seattle architect, they designed the world’s first and only revolving glass floor restaurant opened high atop the Space Needle which is one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world at the feet of 605.0 in Seattle, Washington. The Space Needle was built for the World Fair which took place in 1962 and so it introduced the concept of revolving restaurants to the world.

The Space Needle is an observation tower and is marked and treasured as the Seattle icon. The rotating restaurant on top of Space Needle gives 360-degree indoor and outdoor views of Seattle’s downtown, Mount Rainier, Puget Sound, Cascades, and Olympic mountain ranges. The new glass floor experience in the Space Needle revolving restaurant will legitimately sweep you right off your feet.

A barrel-shaped, but the stationary restaurant on Fernsehturm Stuttgart, a TV tower in Stuttgart, Germany, built-in 1956, was taken as the inspiration for the idea of revolving restaurants. People will always amaze their selves by the panoramic view from the comfort of not leaving their seats as the restaurant itself revolves around 360 degrees one to three times per hour.