Every entry has the same four paragraphs. The first says what kind of place the building stands in and what the ground there is. The second says what the structure actually sits on — rock, a poured slab, steel legs, a timber platform, ice. The third says what carries the weight and what is known about it from published material. The fourth says what the ground then demands of the building: its size, its shape, how it is reached, why it is one block or fifteen separate ones.
There are no figures for pile depth, bearing capacity, concrete grade or excavated volume anywhere in this guide. Those numbers exist in engineering documents, not in the material a reader can check, and quoting them from memory or from a press release would make the entries look precise without making them true. Where the construction is described, it is described in plain words that the published sources support.
Permafrost, river ice, delta silt and steep rock are ordinary ground for the people who build on them, and every building here is engineered for the ground it stands on and inspected under the rules of its country. So there is nothing in these pages about thaw, collapse or flood as a threat to a guest. The interest is in how the ground shapes the design, not in what could go wrong.
The material comes from the hotels' own sites, from published architecture and construction coverage, and from the project descriptions put out by the practices that designed the buildings. Where a claim could not be traced to something published, the wording is kept general rather than made specific. This guide does not publish stay reports: nobody here writes as if they had slept in the room, because that is not what the entries are about.
No prices or price ranges. No stars, scores, rankings or awards. No room counts, floor counts or opening hours. No bookings, no enquiries passed to a hotel, no paid placement of any kind, and no invented faults: this guide does not publish criticism of real companies. If a hotel writes to correct a fact, the entry is corrected.
Four Canadian casino resorts are in the guide because their ground is unusually interesting: a fair-built island, a gorge wall, a river delta and lake-shore land. They are described by exactly the same six-part form as everything else. The gaming floor is not described, rated or recommended, and there are no links to gambling operators. A short block of Canadian help-line numbers sits at the end of that chapter.