Hotel Lobbies and Lounges : The Architecture of Professional Hospitality 9781136489228, 9780415496520

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Hotels occupy a particular place in popular imagination. As a place of exclusive sociability and bohemian misery, a site of crime and murder and as a hiding place for illicit liaisons, the hotel has embodied the dynamism of the metropolis since the eighteenth century. Hotel Lobbies and Lounges: The Architecture of Professional Hospitality explores the architectural significance of hotels throughout history and how their material construction has reflected and facilitated the social and cultural practices for which they are renowned. Including case studies addressing contemporary developments in hotel planning and design, and illustrated throughout, this volume is an innovative and insightful contribution to architectural and interiordesign literature. Tom Avermaete is Associate Professor of Architecture at the TU Delft (Netherlands), with a special research interest in the post-war public realm and the architecture of the city in Western and nonWestern contexts. Tom is the author of Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and is an editor of OASE Architectural Journal. He is also an initiator of the research and exhibition project In the Desert of Modernity: Colonial Planning and After (Berlin, 2008, Casablanca, 2009, Marseille, 2013). Anne Massey is Professor of Design at Middlesex University, UK. Anne has published widely on the subject of interior design and she is also co-editor of the academic journal, Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, launched by Berg in 2010. Anne has contributed to various media, including broadcasts on BBC Radio 4, and has made appearances on TV, including BBC4’s Glamour’s Golden Age and Channel 4’s Titanic: The Mission.

Hotel Lobbies and Lounges

Interior Architecture series

Christoph Grafe, series editor Interiors play a significant role in the patterns of changing use and meaning in contemporary cities. Often designed as short-term proposals in existing (and often former industrial or commercial) buildings, their designers are able to respond flexibly to larger developments on an urban and global scale, both following fashions and trends and establishing them. In the design discipline, there is a high level of awareness of new developments in the wider cultural field, including the visual arts, popular visual culture, advertising and media, that other disciplines within the architectural profession sometimes lack. At the same time, the study of interiors is a largely untheorised field, operating largely outside the traditional territory of academic thought. This series aims at an investigation of the historical, theoretical and practical aspects of interiors by subjecting the results of current design activity and historical precedents to academic examination, discussing them at the level of technical solutions (light, materials and services), and against a wider cultural and historic background. All volumes contain a series of critical articles, texts by practitioners and documentation of key projects, which have been selected to illustrate both their place in the history of design and the architectural solutions employed by their designers. The volumes in the Interior Architecture series can be used as handbooks for the practitioner and as critical introductions to the history of material culture and architecture.

Other titles in this series: Cafés and Bars The architecture of public display Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey Boutiques and Other Retail Spaces The architecture of seduction David Vernet and Leontine de Wit

Hotel Lobbies and Lounges The architecture of professional hospitality Edited by Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 selection and editorial material, Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not acknowledged here and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future printings or editions of the book. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hotel lobbies and lounges : the architecture of professional hospitality/ [edited by] Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey. p. cm. – (Interior architecture) 1. Hotel lobbies. 2. Hotels – Designs and plans. 3. Architecture and society. I. Avermaete, Tom. II. Massey, Anne. NA7800.H665 2012 728′.5–dc23 2011028983 ISBN: 978–0–415–49652–0 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–49653–7 (pbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–13750–5 (ebk) Typeset in Chaparral, Corporate and Akkurat by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

Contents

Illustration credits Notes on contributors

Introduction – Hotel lobbies: anonymous domesticity and public discretion 01 Beyond the lobby: setting the stage for modernity – the cosmos of the hotel Franziska Bollerey 02 Learning from Los Angeles: Hollywood hotel lobbies Anne Massey 03 The architectonics of the hotel lobby: the norms and forms of a public–private figure Tom Avermaete 04 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys Greg Votolato 05 Shifting spaces Graeme Brooker 06 Tracing tracks: illusion and reality at work in the lobby Rajesh Heynickx

Case studies The Ritz, Paris: looking to eighteenth-century France through the lens of nineteenth-century historicism for a twentieth-century hotel lobby Mark Hinchman Strand Palace Hotel, London Lyanne Holcombe Imperial Hotel, Tokyo Greg Votolato Grand Hotel Gooiland, 1936 Tom Avermaete Hotel Le Corbusier: the extended lobby, the resident as guest and the Unité d’Habitation as hotel Nick Leech Watergate Hotel Stefano Milani The Amsterdam Hilton Hotel: Old Amsterdam’s Little America Filip Geerts SAS Hotel, Copenhagen: Arne Jacobsen, 1955–60 Joan Ockman The war lobby of Prora: KdF Seebad on Rügen Filip Geerts Exploding the lobby: Hyatt Regency, Atlanta Charles Rice v Contents

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The Viru Hotel, Tallinn: modernist in form, late socialist in content Andres Kurg Hôtel des Thermes, Dax: Jean Nouvel and Emmanuel Cattani, 1992 Hans Teerds Hotel Lakolk, Rømø, Denmark: Friis and Moltke, 1966 Eva Storgaard Gramercy Park Hotel, New York: 2 Lexington Avenue, New York Nicky Ryan Paramount, New York, 1990: interior design by Philippe Starck Mark Pimlott Hotel Il Palazzo: Venetian blind in Fukuoka Filip Geerts and S. Umberto Barbieri The Zeebrugge Ferry Terminal, OMA: architecture after the crisis of the whole Lara Schrijver CUBE Hotel, Tröpolach: an ultimate home base and stage-scape of the alpine event society Michael Zinganel

Bibliography Index

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Illustration credits Beyond the lobby: setting the stage for modernity – the cosmos of the hotel Franziska Bollery 1.1, Fuchs, Eduard: Geschichte der erotischen Kunst, München 1908 1.2, 1.17b, 1.31a, 1.31b, 1.32a–1.32c, 1.36c, 1.37b, 1.39b, 1.42a, Rucki, Isabelle: Das Hotel in den Alpen. Die Geschichte der Oberengadiner Hotelarchitektur von 1860 bis 1914. Zürich 1989 (gta Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich) 1.3a, Ludy, Robert: Historic Hotels of the World, Philadelphia 2009 (1927) 1.3b, Peck, Amelia: Alexander Jackson Davis. American Architect 18031892, New York 1992 1.4a, Fischer, Bernhard (Ed.): Der Badische Hof 1807–1830. Cottas Hotel in Baden-Baden, Marbach 1997 (Marbacher-Magazin 79/1997) 1.4b, 1.10, 1.12a, 1.13a, 1.13b, 1.25a, 1.25b, 1.26a, 1.26b, 1.34a, 1.36a, 1.36b, 1.38, 1.40, 41.2, FlückigerSeiler, Roland: Hotelpaläste zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit. Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau 1830-1920, Zürich 2003 (2001) 1.4c, 1.27, Saudan, Michel et Sylvia: De L’Hotel-Palais en Riviera. Genève 1985 1.4d, 1.21c, 1.23, Stadthotels. Bauwelt, Heft 44 vom 24. November 1995 (86. Jahrgang) 1.5a, 1.5b, Durand, Claude Nicolas Louis: Recueil et paralléles des édifices de tous genres, anciens et modernes, remarquables par leur beauté, par leur grandeur ou par leur singularité, et dessiné sur une même êchelle, Atlante, in folio di 92 tavole, Paris 1800 1.5c, Durand, Claude Nicolas Louis: Prècis des leçons d’architecture données à l’Ecole Polytechnique, 2 volumi in 4 con 64 tavole, Paris 1802-1805 1.6a, 1.6b, 1.7a, MontgomeryMassingberd, Hugh and David Watkin: The London Ritz. A Social and Architectural History. London 1980

1.7b, 1.8a, 1.8b, 1.17a, 1.18, 1.19a, 1.19b, 1.21a, 1.21b, 1.22b, 41.2, D’ Ormesson, Jean , David Watkin u.a.: Grand Hotel. The Golden Age of Palace Hotels. An Architectural and Social History. New York 1984 1.7c, 1.33, MacKenzie, Compton: The Savoy of London. London, Toronto, Wellington, Sydney 1953 1.7d, Meade, Martin, Joseph Fitchett, Anthony Lawrence: Grand Oriental Hotels. London 1987 1.9, Horstmann, Theo, Regina Weber (Ed.): “Hier wirkt Elektrizität”. Werbung für Strom 1890-2010, Ausstellungskatalog, Essen 2010 1.11a, 1.15, 1.16c, Just, Karl Wilhelm: Hotels, Restaurants. Leipzig 1933 (Handbuch der Architektur, IV. Teil, 4. Halbband, Heft 1). (doppelt) 1.11b, Pizza, Antonio, Josep Maria M. Rovira (Eds.): In Search of Home. Coderch 1940/1964, Barcelona 2000 1.12b, Klasen, Ludwig: GrundrissVorbilder von Gasthäusern, Hôtels und Restaurants. Leipzig 1884 (Grundriss-Vorbilder für Gebäude aller Art, Abth. II) 1.12c, 1.14a–1.14c, 1.16a, 1.16b, Hude, Hermann von der: Hotels. In: Handbuch der Architektur. Vierter Teil, 4. Halbband: Entwerfen, Anlage und Einrichtung der Gebäude. Gebäude für Erholungs-, Beherbergungs- und Vereinszwecke, Darmstadt 1885 1.13c, 1.28, 1.29a, 31.4, 1.34b, 1.34c, Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelträume zwischen Gletschern und Palmen. Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau. 1830–1920, Zürich 2005 (2001) 1.13d, Hotels – Hôtels. Archithese. Zeitschrift und Schriftenreihe für Architektur. Heft 2, 1988 1.13e, 1.24b, Schmitt, Michael: PalastHotels. Architektur und Anspruch eines Bautyps. 1870–1920. Berlin 1982 1.20a–1.20c, Prinzler, Hans Helmut: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Ein Melancholiker des Films, Berlin 2003

vii Illustration credits

1.22a, Rota, Italo: Not only Buildings, Milano 2000 1.24a, Bollerey, Franziska: Photography July 1998 1.29b, Negro, Francesco dal: Hotel des Alpes. Historische Gastlichkeit von Savoyen bis Tirol, Baden 2007 1.30, 1.39a, 1.41a, Roethlisberger, Marcel, Hans Hartmann : Die Alpen in der Schweizer Malerei. Ausstellungskatalog Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur 1977 1.31c, Leuzinger, Hans: 1887-1971. Pragmatisch modern. Dokumente zur Schweizer Architektur, Zürich 1993 gta Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich 1.35, Künzli, Lis (Hrsg.): Hotels. Ein literarischer Führer. Frankfurt am Main 1996 1.37a, Rätisches Museum (Ed.): Bündner Hotellerie um 1900 in Bildern, Chur 1992 Learning from Los Angeles Anne Massey 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.5, 2.12, Courtesy of Library of Congress 2.3, Collection of author 2.6, Balio, Tino, History of the American Cinema. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1993, p. 199 2.7, Week-end at the Waldorf, directed by Robert Z. Leonard, MGM, 1945 2.8, The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols, Embassy, 1967 2.9, Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall, Touchstone Pictures, 1990 2.10, Press Office, Beverly Wiltshire, Four Seasons Hotel, 2010 The architectonics of the hotel lobby: the norms and forms of a public–private figure Tom Avermaete 3.1, Duluth News Tribune Archives 3.2, Folder. Private Collection Tom Avermaete 3.3, Folder. Private Collection Tom Avermaete 3.4, Postcard Chuckman Collection, Chicago

3.5, Balio, Tino, History of the American Cinema. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1993, p. 199 3.6, 3.7, Duluth News Tribune Archives The hotel lobby and local/global journeys Greg Votolato All images: TU Delft Shifting spaces Graeme Brooker 5.1, 5.3, Malmaison Hotels 5.2, Architects Design Partnership (ADP) 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, Anouska Hempel Design 5.7, Richard Davies 5.8, 5.9, Philippe Starck Tracing tracks: illusion and reality at work in the lobby Rajesh Heynickx 6.1, Balio, Tino, History of the American Cinema. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1993, p. 199 6.2, Postcard private collection Rajesh Heynickx 6.3, Postcard private collection Rajesh Heynickx 6.4, Private collection Rajesh Heynickx 6.5, Library of Congress, Print and Photographs Collection. Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), ca. 1904 6.6, Library of Congress, Print and Photographs Collection 6.7, Indianapolis Museum of Art. Edward Hopper Case studies All drawings of plans and sections were made by Xander Cornelis and Tessa Spoelstra. The Ritz, Paris Mark Hinchman 1, University of Nebraska Libaries 2-6, book: The Paris Ritz by Mark Boxer. The title page says that all parts of the book are copyright of "The Ritz Hotel, Limited, 1991" 7, Hinchman, Mark Photography 8, Hinchman, Mark Photography 9, Hinchman, Mark Photography

Strand Palace Hotel Lyanne Holcombe All images: private collection Lyanne Holcombe

Hotel Lakolk, Rømø, Denmark Eva Storgaard All images: Arkitektur, no. 6, 1966, p. 241–251

Grand Hotel Gooiland, 1936 Tom Avermaete All images: NAI Collectie/Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Rotterdam

Gramercy Park Hotel, New York Nicky Ryan 1, Photograph courtesy of Ian Schrager Company 2, Lobby, Gramercy Park Hotel with paintings by Julian Schnabel Suddenly Last Summer (2005) and Cy Twombly, Bacchus (2005). Photograph courtesy of Ian Schrager Company 3, Rose Bar, Gramercy Park Hotel with paintings by Julian Schnabel, Suddenly Last Summer (2005) and ‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ (1988) and Andy Warhol, Rorschach (1984). Photograph courtesy of Ian Schrager Company

Hotel Le Corbusier Nick Leech All images: FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Watergate Hotel Stefano Milani All images: Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italy The Amsterdam Hilton Hotel Filip Geerts All images: NAI Collectie/Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Rotterdam SAS Hotel, Copenhagen Joan Ockman All images: The Library of the Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen The war lobby of Prora Filip Geerts 1, 4, Filip Geerts private collection. 2, 3, Herbert Hoffman, Deutschland Baut, 1939. 5, PJ Brenner (Ed.) Reisekultur in Deutschland: Von der Weimarer Republik zum 'Dritten Reich'. Tubingen, 1997 Hyatt Regency, Atlanta Charles Rice All images: Private collection Charles Rice The Viru Hotel, Tallinn Andres Kurg All images: © Museum of Architecture in Tallinn Hôtel des Thermes, Dax Hans Teerds All images: Jean Nouvel Architects, Paris

viii Illustration credits

Paramount, New York, 1990 Mark Pimlott All images: Todd Eberle, Morgans Hotel Group Hotel Il Palazzo Filip Geerts, S. Umberto Barbieri All images: S. Umberto Barbieri private collection The Zeebrugge Ferry Terminal, OMA Lara Schrijver All images: OMA Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam CUBE Hotel, Tröpolach Michael Zinganel 1, 5, Baumschlager & Eberle Architects 2, 3, 4, Novaron Architects

Notes on contributors

Tom Avermaete is Associate Professor of Architecture at the TU Delft (Netherlands), with a special research interest in the post-war public realm and the architecture of the city in Western and non-Western contexts. He is the author of Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and editor of Architectural Positions: On Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (2009), Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (2010) and Structuralism Reloaded (2011). He is an editor of OASE Architectural Journal and one of the initiators of the research and exhibition project In the Desert of Modernity: Colonial Planning and After (Berlin, 2008, Casablanca, 2009, Marseille, 2013). S. Umberto Barbieri is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft, where he has occupied the Chair of Architectural Composition. Among the areas of his research are the form and significance of architectural precedents for contemporary designers. Barbieri previously worked as a lecturer in Delft and at the Academies of Architecture in Tilburg and Rotterdam. He has also been a visiting professor in Milan, Venice and Berlin. In addition to his career in education he also spent many years working as an architect. He worked extensively with Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi and Jo Coenen and also had his own practice, under the name of Studio di Architettura, together with Eric Hulstein. He was in charge of such well-known projects as the new buildings for the Bonnefantenmuseum, houses on the Slachthuisterrein in The Hague and the Monumento Urbano in Zaandam. Franziska Bollerey is Head of the Institute of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism, as well as Professor of History of Architecture and Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. She is visiting professor and researcher at various universities, including Barcelona, Berlin, Braunschweig, Budapest, Istanbul, London, New York, Stockholm and Zurich. She has published numerous books and articles in German, English, Dutch, Italian and French, including Architekturkonzeptionen der utopischen Sozialisten (2nd edition 1991), Cornelis van Eesteren: Urbanismus zwischen de Stijl and C.I.A.M. (1999), Myth Metropolis: The City as a Motif for Writers, Painters and Film Directors (2006) and, together with Christoph Grafe, Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display, in 2007. In 2008, she launched the IHAAU bulletin Ezelsoren. Graeme Brooker is a Senior Lecturer in Interior Architecture at the University of Brighton. His research interests are focused on the cultural, historical and philosophical implications of reusing existing spaces and buildings. He has written and published numerous books, papers, articles and reviews on this subject, including the highly acclaimed Rereadings (2005). He is currently working on a number of publications, including a reader on interiors for Routledge, an edition ix Notes on contributors

of commissioned essays on the interior for Berg and a book on a history of interiors with Laurence King. He is the Director of Interior Educators (IE), the national subject association for interiors courses in the UK. Filip Geerts graduated as an architect from Delft University of Technology in 2001. Since then, he has been associated with UFOarchitecten, collaborating with S.U. Barbieri on various projects and competitions, including Wiener & Co., an apartment project in Amsterdam in co-operation with Giorgio Grassi. Previous practical architectural work includes internships at STUDIO, architecture and interior architecture, Amsterdam (September–December 2000) and Cunningham Architects in Dallas, Texas, USA (1999). During his student years, he was one of the organisers of the manifestations Indesem1998 in Delft and EASA 20(00) in Antwerp/Rotterdam. He has been working at the Faculty of Architecture (TU Delft) since January 2002, at first as a research fellow and later as assistant professor, teaching studio and seminars, and he is intensely involved with the development and coordination of undergraduate and graduate programmes. He also taught at the Academie van Bouwkunst, Amsterdam. He initiated his Ph.D. research ‘Architecture/Territory’ in 2003 under Professor S. Umberto Barbieri. Rajesh Heynickx teaches architectural theory at the Sint Lucas School of Architecture (Associated Faculty of the University of Leuven) and art history at the University of Antwerp. He has specialised in intellectual history and edited The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism (2009) and Making a New World: Communities and Architecture in Interwar Europe (expected in 2012) (both Leuven University Press). His current research concerns the dissection of obscure(d) histories of modernist aesthetics and the history of post1945 architectural theory. Mark Hinchman is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design Program, College of Architecture, at the University of Nebraska. His professional experience includes work for the Environments Group (now Perkins and Will) in Chicago and Philipp Holzmann in Frankfurt. He has a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago, and he was a member of one of Colin Rowe’s last urban design studios at Cornell University. The author of History of Furniture: A Global View, his research interests include designed objects, African architecture, postcolonialism and eighteenth-century France. Lyanne Holcombe is a Lecturer in Design History at the University of Brighton and teaches Contextual Studies at Kingston University. She completed her MA in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum in 2005 and is x Notes on contributors

currently researching a Ph.D. with the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University. A working title for the thesis is ‘Art, luxury and taste: the design and decoration of the Palace Hotel in London, 1890–1939’. With an interest in public interiors and spaces of leisure, her research is informed by visual and material culture, as she is interested in the influence of modernism and design change in everyday interiors from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Andres Kurg is an architectural historian and researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. He is coeditor of Environment, Projects, Concepts: Architects of the Tallinn School 1972–1985 (Tallinn, 2008). He has published articles in the Journal of Architecture, Interiors and A Prior Magazine and has contributed to exhibition catalogues on post-Socialist urban transformations and spatial conflicts. His current research looks at the architecture and design of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and 1970s, in relation to technological transformations as well as changes in everyday life and value systems. Nick Leech is a design historian, landscape architect and writer. After studying design history at the V&A/RCA, he lectured in Design History and Material Culture before embarking on a career in landscape design. Working in private practice throughout Europe and the Middle East, he now works as an independent design consultant specialising in sustainable landscape design in arid climates. Nick also works as a freelance journalist, and his articles have appeared in the national and international press. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Kingston, where he is researching the material culture of British diplomacy in the twentieth century. Anne Massey is Professor of Design History at Kingston University and Deputy Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre. She is co-editor of the academic journal, Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, launched by Berg in 2010. She has published widely on the subject of interior design, and her books include Interior Design Since 1900 (Thames & Hudson, 3rd edition, 2008), Designing Liners: Interior Design Afloat (Routledge, 2006) and Chair (Reaktion, 2011). Appearances on TV include BBC4’s Glamour’s Golden Age and Channel 4’s Titanic: The Mission. Stefano Milani graduated as an architect cum laude from the IUAV of Venice. From 2001 to 2005, he worked as project architect at Nio Architecten in Rotterdam. Since 2004, he has been partner at the architectural firm Ufo Architects. He has been also carrying out research on architectural drawings at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. Assuming drawings as the privileged field of architectural knowledge, the research attempts to enhance the role of architectural drawing within design research and theory. At the same faculty, he has also been teaching within the Territory in Transit xi Notes on contributors

Research Programme. In 2006, he was invited to take part in the Tenth Architecture Biennale in Venice. He recently curated the publication, Franco Purini, Drawing Architectures, 2008 and, with Filip Geerts, the Symposium on the Ideal/Real City. Joan Ockman is an architectural historian, critic and educator. She directed the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University from 1994 to 2008 and taught at Columbia for over two decades. She currently holds visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. Her book Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993) is now in its fifth edition. Her latest book, Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, is published by MIT Press and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (2012). Mark Pimlott is an artist and architectural designer. He currently teaches and conducts research as senior lecturer at TU Delft, the Netherlands. He is the author of Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior (2007) and In Passing (2010). His current research is concerned with the original model for the very extensive public interior, the 1960s core of Montréal’s ville intérieure. He studied architecture at McGill University and the Architectural Association, and fine art at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. He has exhibited his installations, films and photographs widely for the past twenty years. A notable recent installation, Piazzasalone, made in collaboration with the architect Tony Fretton, was exhibited at the Twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale (2010). His commissions for public artworks, like his photographs, typically focus on places and interiors, for various locations in Britain. In his own practice and in collaborations with other architects, he has realised designs for buildings and interiors in Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. Pertinent to the subject of his contribution to this publication, his professional experience includes design coordination of two hotels designed by Philippe Starck for Ian Schrager, in London. Charles Rice is Professor and Head of the School of Art and Design History at Kingston University London, where he is also a senior researcher in the Modern Interiors Research Centre. He is author of The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Routledge, 2007), and recent essays have appeared in anthologies including Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture (Wiley, 2009), Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects and the Modern City (Routledge, 2009), Designing the Modern Interior (Berg, 2009), and in journals including Architectural Design and Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture.

xii Notes on contributors

Nicky Ryan is Programme Director of Spatial and Interdisciplinary courses in the Faculty of Design, London College of Communication (LCC). Her doctoral thesis was an examination into cultural–commercial collaborations and the interrelationship between corporations, artists, cultural institutions and governments. Current research interests include museums and curating, corporate patronage, critical spatial practice and the role of culture in regeneration. Nicky has delivered a range of conference papers and publications in relation to the above. She is a regular reviewer for the Museums Journal and is Director of the Museum Futures Group, a research and consultancy collaborative based at LCC. Lara Schrijver is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft. Schrijver holds degrees in architecture from Princeton University and TU Delft. She received her Ph.D. from the TU Eindhoven in 2005. Schrijver has taught design and theory courses and contributed to conferences in the Netherlands as well as abroad. She was an editor for OASE, an architecture journal, for ten years, and was co-organiser of the 2006 conference The Projective Landscape. Her current work revolves around the role of architecture in the city and its responsibility in defining the public domain. Her first book, Radical Games, on the influence of the 1960s on contemporary discourse, was published in September 2009. Eva Storgaard is a Ph.D. candidate at the Antwerp University Association (AUHA), Architectural Sciences, Belgium. She graduated in architecture from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research deals with latemodern architecture and interior architecture (1958–73) in Belgium, focusing on unknown revisions and corrections of high modernism and influences from Scandinavia. Storgaard recently completed a research study on the Belgian designer and interior architect Pieter De Bruyne (1957–87). She is currently preparing an exhibition (together with the Design Museum Gent, Belgium) and a catalogue raisonné concerning the oeuvre of Pieter De Bruyne. She frequently writes articles for the architectural magazine de Architect. Hans Teerds studied architecture and urbanism at Delft University of Technology. He graduated in 2003 and currently works as an independent architect and urban designer in Amsterdam on a wide range of projects. At Delft University of Technology, he was one of the organizers of the project Architectural Positions and editor of the anthology Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (2009). His current research focuses on an architectural reading of the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in particular focusing on her notion of the Public Realm. He writes on architecture, urbanism and landscape for several newspapers and magazines, and is editor of the architectural journal OASE. xiii Notes on contributors

Gregory Votolato is an architect, curator, teacher and writer on design, technology and culture. Born in the United States, he trained as an architect at the Rhode Island School of Design and also took degrees in Art History and Fine Art at Boston University and Pratt Institute in New York, earning his Ph.D. at Teesside University in the UK. Doctor Votolato was formerly Professor of Design at Buckinghamshire New University and is currently course tutor for Twentieth-Century Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has lived and worked in England since the 1970s, practising architecture, teaching, curating exhibitions and writing. Votolato is the author of American Design in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1998), Transport Design: A Travel History (Reaktion, 2007) and Ship (Reaktion, 2011). Michael Zinganel is an architecture theorist, cultural historian, curator and artist, currently teaching at the postgraduate academy of Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. He studied architecture at Graz, fine arts at the Jan van Eyck Academy Maastricht and obtained a Ph.D. in contemporary history at the University of Vienna. He realized projects in diverse formats e.g. about social housing in the 1930s, post-war single family homes, and the productive force of crime for the development of art, architecture and urban design. Since 2003 he has worked on urban and transnational mobility, contemporary mass tourism and migration. Since 2010 he has been head of the research project ‘Holidays after the Fall: History and Transformation of Socialist Leisure Architecture at the Bulgarian Black Sea and the Croatian Adriatic Coast’.

xiv Notes on contributors

Introduction Hotel lobbies: anonymous domesticity and public discretion

Hotels and hotel lobbies have always occupied a particular place in the popular imagination. As a place of exclusive sociability and bohemian misery, a site of crime and murder, and as a hiding place for illicit liaisons, the hotel and its combination of experiences of public display and anonymity embody the dynamic development of the metropolis since the early nineteenth century. Offering venues for the social activities of the new urban upper and middle classes, the grand hotel was established as a building type containing huge space for festive events and more intimate interiors for exclusive socialising and private dining. Essentially an urban phenomenon, the grand hotel also played an important role in transforming areas such as the Swiss Alps, the English seaside, the French Riviera and the spa district of Bohemia into early touristic destinations. The hotel became an enclave and a microcosm of the privileged in a rural environment, a backdrop for luxurious, conspicuous consumption. Twentieth-century mass tourism changed the status of the hotel from a venue for public display into a highly standardised and rationalised machine offering efficient accommodation for (often) large numbers of travellers. This redefinition of the hotel was paired with a re-articulation of the lobby space. The business and resort hotels, especially in their incarnation as branches of globally operating, transatlantic chains of the post-war era, epitomise this concept of a modernist, universal standard, providing not only predictable accommodation, but also a ‘normalised’ public environment: lobbies, bars and restaurants that were designed to be identical around the world. Since the 1980s, there has been a re-emergence of the specific and tailor-made in the planning and marketing of hotels, which increasingly target specific lifestyle groups and highlight the character of their locations in the new typology of the boutique hotel, the wellbeing centre, chambre d’hôte, posada and the heritage hotel. There is a wealth of published material on the hotel lobby, mainly case studies of gorgeous luxury interiors that are spanking new and strangely unpeopled, inviting us to book in. In these publications, interior designers and architects are celebrated in the detail of the enticing, pristine images with artful lighting and carefully arranged flowers. Spaces are ‘Ultraluxe’, ‘Cool’ and ‘Hip’. Books with a more historical approach tend to focus on the social history of the hotel, a rich and fascinating area, but one that leaves the design and use of the hotel lobby at the periphery. The book draws on a broad range of disciplines and aims to critically examine the history and development of the hotel lobby, coupled with a valuable collection of case studies that analyse eighteen key hotel lobbies, from the first luxury hotel lobby at the Ritz, Paris, through to the first boutique hotel lobby, in New York. All case studies have accompanying, specially drawn plans and elevations that offer a rare level of visual information. The first section of the book comprises a collection of essays that investigate the cultural meaning and history of the hotel lobby from a variety of perspectives. Franziska Bollerey offers a critical reading of 01 Introduction

the history of the European hotel within the context of social prestige and the development of tourism. Reaching right back to the Roman ‘hospice’, she provides a unique and novel reading of this interior type. Anne Massey provides a history of the hotel lobby in terms of filmic representation and the lowly career of hotel-lobby design, only recently achieving celebrity status. The architectonics of the hotel lobby and the way that different elements – from revolving door to reception desk – articulate a complex figure of privacy and publicity are discussed by Tom Avermaete. Greg Votolato traces the history of the hotel lobby in terms of travel and modernity, while Graeme Brooker considers examples of hotel lobbies that remodel existing interiors, from prisons through to monasteries. Rajesh Heynickx illuminates how the hotel lobby also plays a central role in critical theory, particularly in the work of Siegfried Kracauer. All essays share a concern with the impact of modernity, the slippage between the private and the public, and issues of prestige and performativity. The hotel lobby is an ephemeral space, not built to last, but built to attract the right type of client. As such, it is a type of interior architecture that draws on fleeting fashionability, but that still offers the promise of a rich slice of contemporary modern society. Granted, this is a particular section of society, sifted and sorted by the perennial revolving door and surveyed by the ubiquitous reception desk. But it is an essentially modern space, determined by commerce and dictated by style. Popular and vibrant, offering a stage set for the weary traveller or celebrity to move through and beyond. Tom Avermaete Anne Massey

02 Introduction

1 Beyond the lobby Setting the stage for modernity – the cosmos of the hotel Franziska Bollerey

The lobby of a hotel is part of a highly complex system. Neither in its function nor in its spatial disposition can it be separated from the entire cosmos of a hotel. In the following, the genesis of the hotel, and especially that of the grand hotel, will be described in the section ‘From hospice to luxury hotel’, by means of a short history of accommodation as well as an analysis of an architectural typology. Further on, social segregation taking place in the hotel will be discussed as a mirror of the urban macrocosm in the section ‘On and behind the stage’. Furthermore, the role the hotel has played as a motor of urbanisation, as a consequence of a growing tourism, will be demonstrated in the section ‘From purpose-oriented travel to tourism: the urbanisation of the countryside’, followed by a short résumé entitled ‘Surface culture’. From hospice1 to luxury hotel ‘Hospitality is the custom of accommodating strangers in need of shelter, food and protection.’2 This either took the form of hospitableness – it was mentioned as early as in Homer’s Odyssey – or professionally handled accommodation (commercialisation of hospitality). To be a host was only possible initially if one had appropriate rooms at one’s disposition. The guest’s answer to hospitality commonly was a gift or donation. In the context of temple visits or the Olympic Games, professional accommodation had already evolved in ancient Greece. Mainly in Athens and Sparta, the job was done by means of simple hostels called leschen (lechos – pallet). Later on, in all big cities, pandokeen developed for the use of discerning travellers, if they lacked personal relations in the respective cities. Along the country roads, with their increasing traffic, katagogias served as accommodation for strangers (without service of food).3 Like many other Roman emperors, Nero (AD 37–68) and Hadrian (AD 76–138) decreed the building of tabernae and praetoriae along country and military roads, as well as on the coast of the Red Sea. Juridically, long before this time, a category for the hospitium (later hospice) as a house of accommodation was defined. Distinction was made between caupo and stabularius. ‘A caupo was someone “qui patitur viatores in caupona manere” – who accommodated travellers commercially. A stabularius was a person “qui permittit, iumenta apud eum stabulari”, i.e. who combined stables with his inn.’4 Moreover, Romans distinguished between tabernarius – an eating-house – and popinarius – a taproom. For people not travelling on foot, mule, horse and horse and cart were the customary means of transport. Guesthouses, inns, auberges or albergi, until the introduction of modern means of transportation, usually offered stabling, too. Since Roman times, guest houses and inns have borne names.5 The habit of naming inns after a coat of arms goes back to the custom of travelling sovereigns fixing their coat of arms to the door or window 03 Beyond the lobby

of an inn. Travelling noblemen also frequently left their escutcheons as an acknowledgement of services rendered. Therefore, it served as a recommendation for an inn to possess as many of those escutcheons as possible. Here, we have the beginnings of a tendency and a marketing mechanism that was to play an important role up to the days of the grand hotel and even today. If a hotel can count prominent clients among its guests, its kudos – and with it levels of bookings – can be boosted. A specific reason to establish professional inns was offered by pilgrimages and crusades. After the council of Carthage in 398, a bishop was obliged to ‘erect a hostel near the church’.6 Wherever monasteries were not able to offer sufficient shelter themselves, monastic orders installed hospices or taverns that also catered for commercial travellers. The most famous kind of accommodation for travelling salesmen were the caravanserais. In the Orient, they served as accommodation along the caravan routes, spaced by the distance of a day’s journey.7 In China, the inns were similar to caravanserais. As a rule, travellers brought their own bedclothes along.8 For centuries, the roadhouses were – with few exceptions – not places of any refinement. In his Colloquia, Erasmus of Rotterdam is critical that nobody cares for arrivals, that the water to wash one’s hands was so dirty that one had to look for another source of water to remedy the result of the first ablution. In a single room, more than eighty or ninety guests were frequently assembled: Wayfarers, horsemen, merchants, boatmen, wagoners, farmers, boys, women, healthy and sick persons. Here somebody combs his hair, there another gets rid of his sweat, still another one may clean shoes or boots, somebody belches with garlic, in short it is a tangle of languages and people like at the construction of the tower of Babylon.9 As in the present, the past also knew differences in the quality of houses of hospitality. Michel de Montaigne, in his diaries, also reports positive things about them. There is talk of a pumping station in an Augsburg inn, which according to demand was able to supply kitchens and every other place with fresh water – in the sixteenth century, a truly rare domestic installation of a technological character. The following makes one think of the extravaganzas of the grand hotels of the belle époque: We stayed at the Krone, a decent inn. Into the wainscoting of the dining hall a kind of cage was inserted, inside which a greater number of birds found room. Poised gangways, hung from brass wires, crossed the room and enabled the birds to promenade.10

04 Franziska Bollerey

1.1 Thomas Rowlandson’s 1791 caricature shows an inn typical of the time, with galleries and accommodation for horses and coaches

Mr. Montaigne there also made the attempt to cover himself in bed by a duvet which is in use there and was very content with it; he saw that it was an equally warm and lightweight cover.11 Much more typical, however, of the accommodation at the time (see fig. 1.1) were situations such as those described both by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Prosper Mérimée: In the first place the doors do not have locks . . . secondly the windowpanes are from oiled paper instead of glass, thirdly a most necessary facility is lacking . . . When I asked the servant for a certain facility, he pointed down into the courtyard ‘Qui abasso può server si!’ I asked: ‘Dove?’ – ‘Da per tutto, dove vuol’d (1786, from Italy).12 And Prosper Mérimée reports: We arrived at the tavern . . . one big room served as kitchen and equally as dining hall and dormitory. On a slab of stone in the middle of the room an open fire was burning. Along the wall one could see five or six greasy mule blankets spread out; those were the beds for the night lodgers.13 Where there were bedsteads, one protected oneself by calf-, goator deerskins against the vermin that existed in abundance. In cities, as well as in swanky holiday destinations,14 the conditions of accommodation looked better. Reference reading here is William Makepeace Thackeray, who, in his novel Vanity Fair, describes hotels on the Rhine, in Brussels and London in Napoleon’s times.15 The Baden-Baden hotel, “Badischer Hof” (see fig. 1.2), built between 1807 and 1809, is regarded as an early prototype of the 05 Beyond the lobby

1.2 Hotel Badischer Hof, Baden-Baden, designed by Friedrich Weinbrenner, 1807–9

European luxury hotel. Its American pendant can be seen in Boston’s Tremont House from 1829. Its 170 rooms by far outclassed the considerably smaller number of rooms of its contemporaries. The Tremont had one- and two-bed rooms, as well as indoor toilets and ‘service included such novelties as an individual lock on the door, a bowl and a pitcher and free soap for every guest-room’.16 The claim was made for it being the ‘pioneer first-class hotel in America’ (figs. 1.3a and 1.3b).17 Charles Dickens, during his first stay in America, called it ‘a very excellent one’.18 Badischer Hof in Germany, on the other hand, with its seventy rooms, was indeed considerably smaller than the American Tremont House. But, in Baden-Baden, we have – in an epoch of a scarcely developed art of running a hotel and a table d’hôte – the first evidence of a type of real luxury hotel. The two developers of Badischer Hof, the Baden privy councillor Johann Ludwig Klüber and renowned publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta (‘Cotta, the Napoleon amongst the booksellers’19), wanted the perfect hotel palace that offered its guests in the different price brackets a good kitchen, luxurious possibilities to take a bath (12 rooms had bathing installations) a garden, a theatre with casino, rooms for balls and billiard, a library, even a bookshop. Taken together with the fact that a good deal of foodstuffs came from the hotel’s chicken run and vegetable garden, the hotel resembled a kind of city within the city.20 06 Franziska Bollerey

1.3a Hotel Tremont House, Boston, 1829, by Isaiah Rogers 1.3b Astor Hotel, New York, 1794–6, by Benjamin H. Latrobe

As architect, one could enrol Friedrich Weinbrenner21, one of the most prominent architects of the neo-classical period. Weinbrenner was probably lured to the Badische Hof by the task of converting a monastery into a modern hotel furnished with all imaginable comfort. The requirements included to ‘convert the monastery’s central space into a hall that takes its light from a cupola and around which on all three levels a gallery will run in front of the sitting rooms, from which one can look down on the hall’.22 This model survives to the present day as the type of ‘atrium’ hotel that is exemplified in modern times by, among others, the Barcelona hotel Rey Juan Carlos. Over fourteen storeys, behind the glass parapets of the balconies, the doors to the individual rooms become visible.23 As someone who rediscovered galleries under a glass-domed inner yard, such as at the Badischer Hof, John Calvin Portman is well regarded. Here, the atriums of Jean Baptiste André Godin’s Familistère24 (1859), inspired by François Marie Charles Fourier, come to mind. In the 1967 Atlanta, as well as in the San Francisco Hyatt Regency, the atrium serves as a threedimensional stage, ‘where interactivity is possible again that since the period of the palace hotels was not possible any more’ (see figs. 1.4a–1.4d).25 But let us get back to the hotel Badischer Hof, which Weinbrenner would have liked to have called Karlsbad, so as to profit from the reputation of the celebrated Bohemian spa of that name. In Baden-Baden, however, the name remained Badischer Hof. Besides the disposition of the rooms, it was to anticipate still another feature of the future grand hotels. Into the pattern of rooms, Weinbrenner merged the model of the culture of leisure of the royal and noble palaces with that of the bourgeois ballrooms. To this purpose, the church of the unutilised Capuchin monastery was to be reused as conversation, gambling, concert or ball rooms, as well as ‘for a small convertible theatre’26 for the use of longer-staying guests. Much more pragmatic, and exclusively aimed at the accommodation of short-stay guests, Jean Nicolas Louis Durand’s design for the Hotellerie et Poste comes along. After Johan Bernhard Fischer von Erlach27, Durand was the first architect/theorist to establish building typologies, in 1800, 1801–5 and 1821.28 As teacher at the École Polytechnique in Paris, he analysed the procedural development of building typologies. With regard to hotels, he saw the derivation from the caravanserai as exemplary.29 In 1800, he published samples in his Recueil et parallèles des édifices . . . In his Précis des leçons d’architecture . . . , 1801–5, the caravanserai served as a model for his design for a hotel (figs. 1.5a–1.5c).30 As we can see from the example of Durand’s considerations and the Badischer Hof, different categories of hotel can be discerned. Diversification increases with growing tourism and the growing number of hotels in its wake. Parameters that signify these differences are: 07 Beyond the lobby

1 2

duration of stay (a few nights, up to semi- or permanent residence in ‘boarding houses’ and ‘apartment hotels’31 or ‘pensions’); location of the hotel: (a) in the city centre, as middle-class or grand hotel; (b) special type of railway32 or (today) airport hotel; (c) in the countryside, as spa, well-being or resort hotel.

The category or class of a hotel is chiefly determined by the requirements and financial potential of the clientele. Eduard Guyer wrote, as early as 1874: The first class hotel or grand hotel by and by has obtained a cosmopolitan character. Thanks to the proliferation of wealth and the compensating influence of international communication. One can therefore abstain from designating the national characteristics of modern hotels in the capitals of Europe.33

1.4a Dining hall of Badischer Hof (J. St. Schaffroth), ca. 1810 1.4b Hotel Verenahof, BadenBaden, 1845, by Kaspar Joseph Jeuch 1.4c Hotel Beau-Rivage et d’Angleterre, Geneva, 1865, by Antoine Krafft 1.4d Hotel Rey Juan Carlos I, Barcelona, by Carlos Ferrater and José Maria Cartaña

Since the Second World War, one can hardly speak of a national, respectively individual typological character in relation to most hotels any longer. Conrad Hilton34 was probably one of the first to come up with the suggestion to identify a hotel as part of a chain of hotels and not as part of a specific location. Man the nomad35 changes countries and continents but finds an identical ambience to help with his orientation. Of course, symptoms of fatigue occur because of this uniformity. ‘Design’, ‘art’ or ‘boutique’ hotels are the answer today. Even if Guyer denies the grand hotels a national identity, they at least each had their individual flair. In terms of style, they followed contemporary pluralisms, such as historism, art nouveau or art deco. What gave them an individual note, however, was the specific management of a hotel. One of the elements was the celebration of the guest’s sojourn. Primus inter pares among these stage directors of hotel life, no doubt, was César Ritz. ‘In theatrical terms, Ritz was a showman, a brilliant director and producer, who set the stage for the star performances by the clientele.’36 Reception as well as sojourn, everything was painstakingly matched to the respective guest and stage-managed just for him. It was a matter of course to import green figs and mangoes for the Aga Khan’s breakfast: ‘Ritz shrewedly noted the needs and tastes of both the “old” and the “new” groups, whether it was ice-water for the Americans or Egyptian cigarettes for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.’37 During the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873, already serving as a temporary waiter in the Imperial Pavilion, Ritz never failed to commit to memory the requests and habits of his renowned guests, such as the Prince of Wales. The Vienna restaurant served as a trial stage for his own qualification and promotion, in the same way as would be the case for Thomas Mann’s literary figure of Felix Krull much later. After holding many positions in the hotel and restaurant business, among others in the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo in 1880, Ritz joined 08 Franziska Bollerey

1.5a ’Caravanserai de Cachan’ (from C. N. L. Durand: Recueil, 1800) 1.5b ’Caravanserai près de Sultanie, en Perse’ (from C. N. L. Durand: Recueil, 1800) 1.5c ’Hotellerie et Poste’ (from C. N. L. Durand: Précis de leçons, 1801-1805)

forces with Auguste Escoffier. Under the motto ‘Comfort, cuisine and service’,38 the two from then on worked in tandem (figs. 1.6a and 1.6b). In 1888, when the London Savoy, built by the London theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, neared its finishing stages, he asked Ritz to take over the management. Ritz noted: He wants the clientele I can give him . . . the people who come here, who go to Baden, who were my patrons at Lucerne and Monte-Carlo . . . he wants the Vanderbilts and Morgans; he wants the Rothschilds. He wants to make his hotel the hotel de luxe of London and of the world.39

1.6a Georges Auguste Escoffier, 1846–1935

The Savoy ascends to the metropolitan luxury hotel par excellence, and a visit to its restaurant, ‘Dining at the Savoy’, became a fashion essential. Whatever one may think about music as an accompaniment to the best food, it is certain that, if there is to be music, it must be the best

1.6b César Ritz, 1850–1918

09 Beyond the lobby

1.7a Lavish extravagance – stage production in the Grand Hotel: Madame Ritz, wearing Louis XVI fancy dress 1.7b Serge Lifar’s ‘Ballets Russes’ in the Hotel des Bains, Venice, 1920s 1.7c Banquet (George Kessler) in the flooded courtyard of the Savoy Hotel, London, 1906 1.7d Horse dancing the waltz, Hotel Taj Mahal, Bombay, 1952

music. It was Ritz who started that fashion in London, and he started it with no less a musician than Johann Strauss (figs. 1.7a–1.7d)40 Little wonder that the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was moved to state the following dictum: ‘Where Ritz goes, I go.’41 So he transferred his residence in Paris from the Hotel Bristol42 to the Ritz, built by Ritz in 1898 in the Place Vendôme.43 Marcel Proust was one of the first clients here: The big hotel became his second home, to make up for the palaces of Cabourg44, Venice and Evian, that he was never to see again . . . In the Ritz he found again the emotions and mysteries of a miniature world, the comfort and safety of family life, the gratification of his lifelong longing for rendered services and appropriate gratitude. He did his writing in his cork-protected bedroom, but to experience life, he went to the Ritz.45 Ernest Hemingway, who made the Ritz his regular Paris address after the first of his book successes, exulted: When I dream of a later life in heaven, all is taking place in the Ritz. I down a few Martinis at the bar. Then comes a magnificent dinner under a flowering chestnut tree in the so-called ‘Petite Jardin’. After a couple of Brandies I go up to my room and sink into one of these gigantic Ritz beds that all have a brass bedstead.46 These brass beds, as well as the allocation of a bathroom to each room, were innovations introduced by Ritz. Rightly, his widow, in her book César Ritz: host to the world, asserts ‘that Ritz “was one of the greatest 10 Franziska Bollerey

civilising influences of his time as regards the point of hygiene and sanitation” a claim that is by no means fanciful’.47 How unusual this sanitary equipment was in the Europe of the 1880s is shown by an analysis of hotel ground plans found in architectural manuals.48 The relation between the number of rooms and that of bathrooms and toilets was incredibly poor. As late as 1889, Richard D’Oyly Carte was laughed at when he wished for a better ratio of these numbers for his London Savoy Hotel: When D’Oyly stipulated that the Savoy should have seventy bathrooms, the builder asked him if he were providing for amphibian guests: if he had stipulated then for a bathroom for every room (what Ritz later offered in Paris) he might have been asked if he were erecting an aquarium. Spain is notoriously conservative, but in December 1901 the leading hotel in Madrid had only one bathroom situated in a kind of vault for the use of which a charge of five pesetas was levied from the eccentric guest who wanted to use it, and in those days that was a quarter of the daily charge for board and lodging. Even in London the Hotel Victoria, opened two years before the Savoy at a cost of £520,000, had only four bathrooms for five hundred visitors, and no more had been added in 1897. In fact, the astonishing number of bathrooms at the Savoy, upon which D’Oyly Carte insisted, was indeed an innovation and set the standard for the future [figs. 1.8a and 1.8b].49 1.8a Bathroom in the Savoy Hotel, London, ca. 1900 1.8b Bathroom in the Hotel Majestic, Paris, ca. 1908

‘It were the devices that made the modern hotel modern’,50 Jefferson Williams writes, in The American Hotel: ‘Homes are becoming more hotel-like’ the hotel men say, and they are thinking of the way in which hotels have pioneered in such things as bathtubs (even German emperor Wilhelm I. (1871–1888) has a bathtub brought to the chateau from the Hôtel de Rome),51 modern heating arrangements, and comfortable beds.52 In Europe, Swiss hotels played a pioneering role. In 1847, the Geneva Hotel des Bergues had the first flush lavatories; in 1866, the Samedan Hotel Bernina had bathrooms. In the 1860s, gas lighting was introduced, and, in 1879 in St Moritz, at the Hotel Engadiner Kulm, electric illumination was introduced (fig. 1.9).53 Another essential innovation was the lift (fig. 1.10), also called the ‘vertical train’. Besides other constructive preconditions, this was the real prerequisite for the building of multistorey high-rises. ‘There were (in 1889) six lifts at the Savoy which the American Elevation Company claimed were the largest and most efficient in Europe. There are now thirty-two lifts in the Savoy, twenty-three of which are needed for service’,54 we hear in 1953. The number of the service lifts points to the complicated internal operations of a hotel. 11 Beyond the lobby

1.9 ’The Electrical Hotel’ booklet of Gelsenkirchener Elektrizitätswerke 1.10 Advertising folder of the elevator firm Alfred Schindler, 1902

The guests’ most extravagant requests were to be fulfilled by day and night. To guarantee this, a refined logistical system is necessary that intermeshes the storage of goods and foodstuffs, their preparation and distribution, as well as all other services (figs. 1.11a and 1.11b). A diversified choice is only possible when there are sufficient numbers of guests. This was already known to François Marie Charles Fourier, who envisioned a widely diversified spectrum of activities for his social palace, the Phalanstère (a mix of work and leisure).55 To combine recreation and entertainment, repose and distraction, as well as boarding, a specific architectural disposition was needed. Here, we have to discern different ground-plan designs: the square or rectangular composition with projecting middle and side parts, a building with wings in the classical disposition – now and then with a cour d’honneur – or with angled wings or special shapes, such as a triangular or v-shaped ground plan (figs. 1.12a–1.12c, 1.13a–1.13e and 1.14a–1.14c). Hermann von der Hude discerns, in his typology of elements, the criteria still valid today:56 1 2

characteristics and general disposition; elements and facilities: (a) guest-rooms (b) lounges (c) rooms for administration (d) operational rooms (e) rooms for public concourse.

12 Franziska Bollerey

1.11a (top left) Diagram of the arrangement of rooms in a hotel: Karl Wilhelm Just, 1933 1.11b (bottom left)Diagram of the arrangement of rooms in a hotel: J. A. Coderch de Sentmenat, 1962 1.12a (top right)Hotel ground plan: Hotel Bellevue, Wildbad, 1842 1.12b (middle right)Hotel ground plan: Hotel Austria, Vienna, by Fränkel, 1870s 1.12c (bottom right)Hotel ground plan: Hotel in North America, Hermann von der Hude/F. Baumann, Chicago, 1885

13 Beyond the lobby

1.13a Hotel ground plan: Hotel Bernina, Samedan, 1866 1.13b Hotel ground plan: Grand Hotel Dolder, by Jacques Gros, Zurich, 1898–9 1.13c Hotel ground plan: Hotel Rigi Kulm, by Horace Edouard Davinet, 1875 1.13d Hotel ground plan: Hotel Waldhaus, by Nicolaus Hartmann sen., Vulpera, 1896–7

1.14a Hotel ground plan: Hotel Métropole, by C. Schumann and L. Tischler, Vienna, 1871–3 1.14b Hotel ground plan: Grand Hotel, by Cuthbert Brodrick, Scarborough, 1863–7 1.14c Hotel ground plan: Grand Hôtel (10,000 square metres floorspace) by Alfred Armand, Paris, 1861–2

1.13e Hotel ground plan: Hotel Imperial, by E. Hébrard (J. Kronfuß), Karlsbad, 1912

14 Franziska Bollerey

1.15 Diagrams of the utility and public rooms of a hotel (Karl Wilhelm Just, 1933)

In a fourth chapter, Hude describes examples, starting with the characteristic features of American hotels: On the ground floor the public lobby forms the centre of the entire complex and resembles in its disposition and size the main courts of our European hotels of recent origin. The lobby is lighted from above. It is a frequently visited space. Always guests linger there, sitting down, standing, walking and conversing. Particularly in the evenings the lobby is tersely filled. One is looking for friends and acquaintances, one debates the state of the stock exchange. The counter, a telegraph, an outlet for newspapers and the porter’s lodge are also to be found in the lobby [figs. 1.15a and 1.15b].57 In the pattern of rooms, it is the pivotal point of the social rooms and lounges. Similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s disposition of rooms, where the fireplace takes central stage, from the lobby ‘arms’ reach towards other spatial functions. In most cases, it is placed axially behind an entryway and a vestibule (provided there is one) and, combined with an entrance hall, leads to a winter garden, great dining hall or lounge. ‘The big hall in a way serves as the market place of the hotel, its decoration mainly is dictated by fashion: for its aesthetic language as well as for its application to society’s needs’, Wilhelm Just annotates.58 Hude counts the lobby, along with the interior yards, the entrance halls, staircases for guests and personnel, corridors and lifts for persons, baggage and food, among the concourse zones. The dining halls are part of the spaces made accessible by the lobby: a big dining hall for the table d’hôte, smaller ones for cafes and restaurants, where dining à la carte is customary. Attached to these spaces there are pantry rooms or offices that serve as intermediary zones between the working room of the kitchen and the areas serving restaurant purposes. 15 Beyond the lobby

1.16a Kitchen of the Hotel Frankfurter Hof, by Mylius and Bluntschli, Frankfurt, 1875–6 1.16b Kitchen of Hotel Kaiserhof, by Hermann von der Hude and Julius Hennicke, Berlin, 1878–80 1.16c Kitchen of the Stevens Hotel (3,000 rooms), by Holabird and Roche, Chicago, 1926–7

Public rooms also include reading and conversation rooms, writing rooms, in American hotels a bar, a barbershop, music rooms, porches and various halls (according to the sophistication of the hotel, ballrooms, theatre and conference halls). Saloons and other public rooms are sometimes also on the first floor: on the different storeys one has smaller saloons, serving in some way as social buffer zones between the private space of the hotel room and the public nature of the big society rooms. The great number of operational rooms mirrors most distinctively the labyrinthine but nevertheless impeccably functioning cosmos of the grand hotel. Next to the pantry already mentioned, there are: a main kitchen (figs. 1.16a–1.16c and 1.17a and 1.17b) (‘a practical kitchen disposition is much more important and influences much more deeply the running of a hotel than is usually assumed’);59 a preparatory kitchen; washing-up rooms for table and copperware; and a coffee kitchen with washing-up room, adjoined by storage for tea, coffee, sugar etc. There are also: a milk cellar for the storage of butter and milk; rooms for cleaning vegetables; a silver vault; 16 Franziska Bollerey

1.17a Kitchen of the Adelphi Hotel, by M. and A. Moseley, resp. Atkinson, Liverpool, 1861 and 1914; photograph 1920 1.17b Kitchen of the Hotel Suvretta House, by Karl Koller, St Moritz Bad, 1911–12; photograph 1920 1.18 Grand hotels resembled ocean liners, with storage rooms, wine cellars, taprooms (here, the Ciga hotel chain, Venice), laundries (Hotel Adlon, Berlin), private electricity generating stations and central-heating rooms (Grand Hotel, Paris)

bakery; dessert room; kitchen and eating room for the servants; and more storage rooms for preserves, smoked food, cans and other durable goods. ‘The meat chamber . . . must be situated in a cool place and needs fresh air. One must provide ice containers and basins with running water for living fishes.’60 In the day-cellar, adjoining the wine cellar, the beverages for day-to-day use are stored. An icehouse was necessary before artificial cooling was possible and where there was no supply by the municipal ice-works. Furthermore, one needs laundry facilities and workshops for fitters, carpenters, plumbers and paper hangers, as well as a heating room for the steam-fired central heating (figs. 1.18a–1.18e) and the preparation of warm water for the bathrooms, and, finally, a basement for fuel. One also needs bedrooms for employees and other personnel – the latter usually slept on the attic floor61 – and dining rooms for servants brought along by the guests. Hude subsumes the director’s flat – should he be housed in the hotel – as well as his office under administrative rooms. The ‘bureau’, or offices, the porter’s lodge, a room for the 17 Beyond the lobby

manservant, luggage, toilets and cloakrooms were all to be situated near the entrance, main hall or porch. Chambers for linen, bedclothes and tablecloths were situated, either on the ground-floor in a central position or decentralised on the different floors. In 1885, Hude assumed that, for 500 guests, you needed 130 employees and servants. In addition to the chef de reception, accountant and teller, hall and kitchen supervisors, cellarmaster, office clerk, matrons and housekeepers, Hude reckoned there would be about twenty-five waiters, thirty maids, twenty-five house servants and six grooms in a hotel. Towards the turn of the century, the number of pages and bell-hops increased. Furthermore, four or five boilermen and workmen, three or four coopers, seven sous-chefs and three to five back-up porters and night watchmen were employed. In 1895, the entire personnel of a Paris grand hotel consisted of 600 persons.62 Shortly before World War One, in Swiss hotels with a capacity of 70,000 beds, nearly 100,000 people worked ‘behind the backdrops of the fairy magic’.63 The fortunes of a hotel porter are the central motif of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1924 film, The Last Man. The social position of this protagonist and the social calamities of the hotel personnel, in contrast to the luxurious hotel life of the guests, are the theme of the following section. On and behind the stage

1.19a Bootblack in the Hotel Claridge, Paris 1.19b Jeanne Moreau in the Hotel Meurice, Paris, 1964

For some are in the dark and others in the light you can see those in the light those in the dark you do not see64

18 Franziska Bollerey

1.20a–c Film still from The Last Laugh, 1924, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

The hotel is the one place that concentrates the urban macrocosm of social segregation into the narrowest space. Exposed to sight and helped by a generous offer of ample room, the well-to-do, together with society’s climbers, move as on a stage. Behind the scenes, badly paid and badly accommodated, work the real guarantors of the frictionless operation of a hotel (figs. 1.19a and 1.19b). In his film The Last Laugh, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau portrays this segregation, both at the macro level of the city and at the micro level of the hotel.65 He contrasts pulsating big-city life with the world of the poor’s tenement housing. On the one hand, we see the prestigious façade of the Hotel Atlantic in its affluent surroundings – on the other hand, the backyard (figs. 1.20a and 1.20b). Here, the toing and froing of people in the hotel lobby – there, workers’ wives on the back stairs. And, bluntly emphasising this contrast,66 he sets hotel guests luxuriously slurping oysters against the doorman-protagonist’s wife bringing him lunch in a canteen. This doorman, however, appears here as more than a mere representative of the working class. Daily, he crosses the borders between two worlds. He is some kind of mediator in the way prescribed by his function in the hotel. Here, he is the interfering figure between the external world of the street and the interior sphere of the hotel. He supervises the arrival of the guests, as well as the departure, organises approach and farewell and also the transport of the luggage via a side door. He is the first and last ambassador of the hotel. He reigns over the revolving door67 that sucks the guests inside and conveys them – depending on their rank in society accompanied by the hotel manager – outside. The passage mentioned above across the borders between the segregated levels of proletariat and ‘affluent society’, i.e. in this specific case, the contact with the latter, is made possible by his position and the corresponding uniform. The uniform as a status symbol guarantees him access to, and abidance in, the hotel and the lobby. In his private environment, this position serves him and his family as an element of social upgrading. He becomes the ambassador of a world inaccessible to the proletariat, which he represents by means of his richly adorned frock coat with epaulettes. The hotel – or, more precisely, its specific dress code in its highly diversified hierarchy – serves here as a synonym for the upper class. Murnau’s film, however, insists on still another plot strand: the reversal of the social status – the hotel as a stage on which the actors change their roles. In fiction as in reality, the hotel, with its willingness to compromise vis-àvis solvent customers,68 is the perfect setting to demonstrate such a status switch. In Murnau’s film, in front of habitué guests arrogantly amusing themselves and facing grimacing waiters, the doorman, having become rich through an unexpected inheritance, but not used to the environment of a luxury restaurant as a paying guest, has to be served nevertheless (fig. 1.20c). No longer applicable to him is what Thomas Mann, in Felix Krull,69 characterizes as follows: ‘to the rich 19 Beyond the lobby

1.21a Footman and pageboy at the Savoy Hotel, London 1.21b Receptionist, pageboys and coachman at the Élysée Palace Hotel, Paris 1.21c Still from the 1955 film Hotel Adlon, directed by Joseph von Baky

poverty is a flaw . . . therefore very detestable . . . and so to society it seems wisest to turn a blind eye towards such a faulty product within their order.’70 Nowhere else are poverty and wealth so near to each other as in a hotel. They meet in the lobby, in the lift, in the dining room, in the corridors. For the rich, thanks to careful management, the working and living conditions of the hotel personnel remain invisible. Footboys, commis, valets, lift-boys, suitcase carriers, porters and chambermaids are liveried and gloved for their appearance and contact with the hotel guests (figs. 1.21a–1.21c) and – what is more – by their sheer number and dress code they are meant to suggest court etiquette.71 Thomas Mann has Felix Krull remark: It is also nothing but a dazzlement of the eyes and mainly caused by this great coat à la Saint James and Albany with its velvet applications and gold buttons, which is nothing but the adornment of my position, without which I look like nothing.72 And, in another part of the novel – with a critical glance at the nouveau riche’s world, which more and more counts among the clientele of the grand hotels, we read: 20 Franziska Bollerey

It was the motif of exchangeability: after changing their dress, their styling, the servants could as well have been the gentlefolk, and many of those sprawling in the deep wicker chairs, a cigarette in the side of their mouths, could have been the waiters. It was pure coincidence that things were the other way around – the accident of wealth; for the aristocracy of money is an interchangeable aristocracy by happenstance.73 Still today, the invasion of the nouveau riche into society’s temple, the hotel with its conserving, exclusive cohesiveness, has to be counterbalanced. Felix Krull, in his Paris hotel, the Saint James and Albany,74 not only constitutes a change in status from lift-boy to head waiter, but also exemplifies a role change that is possible within the frame of hotel ambience. ‘Away from home’, free from day-to-day social control and ‘social gossip’, hotel guests are less inhibited – without ever busting out of the circle of the purely formal and conventional completely, as Thomas Mann illustrates by the example of Eleanor Twentyman, Lord Necton Kilmarnock and, last but not least, Madame Houpflé. Felix Krull himself, like an actor changing his role, mutates into the ‘Marquis de Venosta’. A careful analysis of the hotel–stage, with its ups and downs of appearance and real substance, where physical proximity goes along with social distance, provides him with the tools for his performance as man of the world. Norman S. Hayner,75 an author, as already mentioned, from the academic environment of the Chicago School of Sociology centred around Robert S. Park,76 speaks of a habitus characteristic of a hotel guest who protects himself against manifold external influences by inner dissociation. We have here a mechanism of adaptation and coming to terms with circumstances that Georg Simmel generally ascribes to the big-city dweller. If we substitute hotel for big city and hotel guest for city dweller, the latter also has to react to external conditions: Restlessness, i.e. the difficulty or inability to adjust to the anonymous, impersonal atmosphere of a hotel; individuation, i.e. the unimpeded movement of impulses free of constraints; a blasé attitude as defensive reaction against these irritations and agitations that are part of hotel life, and finally a cultivated or ‘man-of-the-world attitude’, a kind of immunisation against the influences of the hotel milieu.77 Felix Krull, in his role as Marquis de Venosta, had convincingly mastered this man-of-the-world attitude. The plot of Thomas Mann’s story Tod in Venedig – Death in Venice – takes a much unhappier course, setting the events in the Hotel des Bains in Venice.78 There, the great number of lounges, passages and restaurant rooms gives the protagonist, von Aschenbach, ample opportunity to more or less blatantly observe young Tadzio daily, the 21 Beyond the lobby

object of his adoration. He forbids himself a direct approach (social distance, in spite of physical nearness). What is applicable to the macrocosm of the big city is true also for the microcosm of the hotel. Robert E. Park calls it ‘meeting but not knowing one another’, and Georg Simmel analyses it as early as the beginning of the twentieth century in Soziologie des Raumes – Sociology of Space.79 In contrast to his novelette Death in Venice,80 in Felix Krull, Thomas Mann describes hotel architecture: ‘A magnificent crown hall with porphyry columns and a gallery running round it on the level of the entresol . . . where plenty humankind moves to and fro.’81 He also throws light on the ‘backstage’: Dormitory no. Four . . . eight beds with grey coarse blankets and thin pillows, perceptibly not washed for a longer time, were arranged in berths, one on top of each other along the side walls . . . else wise the room whose window pointed towards a ventilation shaft, offered no kind of convenience.82 In 1933, George Orwell, who worked as plongeur – dishwasher83 – in Paris restaurants and a hotel,84 describes his impressions: ‘I came across the strangest accounts in the hotel. There was talk of drug addicts and old debauchees that visited the hotel to look for pretty liftboys, of theft and fraud.’85 It was funny, if you looked around the dirty little scullery and thought that it was merely separated from the dining hall by a double door. There they all sat, the guests in their splendour – spotless tablecloths, flower bowls, gilded mouldings and painted cherubim; and us, just a few meters away, in our foul dirt. It really was nauseating dirt. Until evening, there was no time to wipe the floor and we were skidding in a mixture of soapy brine, salad leaves, torn paper and scrunched food.86 ‘Our cafeteria showed perennial dirt in all its dark corners and the bread container was flooded by cockroaches.’87 Equally extreme are Maria Leitner’s descriptions in her novel Hotel Amerika.88 In an admittedly propagandistic, black-and-white portrayal, she contrasts the conditions of the staff accommodation with that of the hotel guests. In his review of the book, Siegfried Kracauer speaks of ‘a luxury hotel seen from below’.89 The author researches the ‘conditions of life of the countless hotel employees . . . light is thrown on that which usually recedes into darkness: that province of an enormous empire in which chambermaids, scrubbing women, waitresses and waiters, porters, night watchmen, pages and kitchen helps dwell’:90 The personnel on the lowest level receive bedclothes that no longer can be repaired. The lacerated mattress shows its filling 22 Franziska Bollerey

1.22a Roof garden of the Hotel Montclair, New York 1.22b Chambermaids at the call-board in a German grand hotel, 1930

of seaweed through torn sheets . . . cockroaches and bugs wander unhurriedly around in spite of the brightness (the rooms of the guests are visited daily by pest-control personnel). But here it can be dirty, here it can remain dirty.91 The ‘down and out’ – socially as well as spatially – have to content themselves, on the third underground level, with water soup and jacket potatoes. The social climbers, on the other hand, sip champagne on the roof terrace at the afternoon dances (figs. 1.22a and 1.22b). Thus, the depictions of exclusive extravagances are part of the same selfcontained hotel cosmos. A ballroom of the Hotel Amerika is furnished for a wedding: From the West Indies and Surinam, flowers and shrubs and trees together with their roots . . . have been transported to New York . . . exotic butterfly and moth larvae also have been delivered . . . all are to hatch on wedding day. 23 Beyond the lobby

It was an abundant luxuriance of forms and colours: Butterflies with blue bodies and translucent, gold coloured wings surround roses from the Caribbean islands with their rich . . . petals in the colour of yellowed ivory . . . also butterflies whose one wing is of a poisonous green whereas the other shows red, blue and yellow lines on tobacco coloured background flutter around them.92

1.23 Hotel Room, painting by Edward Hopper, 1931

But it is not only the lounges that are stages for excessive life. In the extravagant hotel imagined by Leitner, we hear of the room of a proprietress of a coffee plantation, who has ‘transformed it into a miniature forest: with two palm trees, a monkey . . . a parrot and a white cockatoo’.93 Sarah Bernardt, however, when she stayed in the 1884 luxury apartment house that later became the Chelsea Hotel, merely brought with her her coffin that she carried around on all her journeys and in which she slept.94 But those rooms behind the stage of a public appearance also offer a descent into anonymity and into uncontrolled, individual self-fulfilment. ‘The fascination with palace hotels has as much to do with the figures who gave the establishments their distinctive style as with their architecture and technical background.’95 Hayner speaks of a ‘free play of impulses when released from restraint’.96 If the concierge is informed, he keeps silent. This is part of the codex of a hotel. Of course, three musicians in the Paris Ritz cannot

24 Franziska Bollerey

come in or go out without being noticed, when they provide an American playboy with a musical background for his tête-à-tête, as can be seen in Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon.97 Surely, the universe of the hotel – in literature and film, even in painting, if we keep Edward Hopper’s scenes of isolation in mind –has never been anything other than the reflection of all our fears,98 wishes and dreams (fig. 1.23).

1.24a Galeries Lafayette department store, Paris, 1895 1.24b Hotel Hermitage, Monte Carlo, 1906

From purpose-oriented travel to tourism: the urbanisation of the countryside Within the cities, grand hotels from the last quarter of the nineteenth century act – similarly to the big railway stations and department stores – as promoters of urban densification.99 Moreover, they resemble each other stylistically: even their interior disposition points to consistencies with features such as glazed cupolas (figs. 1.24a and 1.24b), lobbies and entrance halls and prestigious staircases. They all possess a multifunctional character that, in various ways, combines possibilities to consume, for leisure activities, refreshment and work. Railway and railway station both offer a combination of likewise staying in one place or travel. The epitome of such a multifunctional amalgam is the Palais Royal,100 where, in an ingenious way, in a sort of unité multifonctionelle, galleries, theatres, shops and luxurious apartments are combined by arcades. Exactly this combination of functions, furthering the leisure needs of demanding hotel clients, was offered by the grand hotels that sprang

25 Beyond the lobby

1.25a Hotel Bellevue, Kleine Scheidegg, ca. 1895 1.25b Hotel Waldhaus, Vulpera, ca. 1900

into existence on the shores of the Atlantic or Mediterranean seas, the Baltic or North Sea, and later the Pacific, as well as in the mountains and on lakesides, in spas or in attractive landscapes. Planted in isolation (figs. 1.25a and 1.25b) or massed together in the countryside (figs. 1.26a and 1.26b), they are – with regard to architecture, interior decoration and technological innovation – representative of urban culture. They were built for a clientele that – fleeing the cities – nevertheless was not willing to renounce its right to habitual comfort. One example of a scenery urbanised by hotels and places of leisure can be seen on the French Riviera. For a multitude of travellers, the railway in the second half of the nineteenth century offered the opportunity to rapidly reach faraway destinations. Early on, the railway networks to attractive holiday landscapes were extended. In 1864, the Chemins de fer du Sud reached the Côte d’Azur from Paris, via Lyon. A hotel boom started and reached its climax around 1900. ‘Au début du XXme siècle, toute la promenade des Anglais (à Nice) n’est pas qu’une suite des palaces, entre lesquels villas réussissent encore à s’intercaler’101 (fig. 1.27). One more phenomenon of urbanisation during the nineteenth century can be seen in the construction of holiday villas in resorts. A mild winter climate and – as an additional attraction – the casinos make for a steady flow of guests. ‘Une monde de viveurs et de joueurs surtout où le “rastaquouérisme” et l’élement mondain prédominent de plus en plus. Pour ceux-là, Nice n’est que l’etape d’hiver au soleil dans la vie brûlée de la fête perpétuelle’,102 we hear in 1897. The process of ‘hotelisation’ started in a modest way as early as the eighteenth century. In 1763, it was the enthusiastic reporting of British physician Tobias Smollet103 about the beneficial climate of the Riviera that set in motion a flood of Englishmen towards the coast. After the fall of Napoleon, they, together with other representatives of the European aristocracy and the early moneyed bourgeoisie, form 26 Franziska Bollerey

1.26a Engelberg, ca. 1910 1.26b Davos, 1923 1.27 Promenade des Anglais, Nice, 1880

27 Beyond the lobby

the bulk of the hotel guests. To please them, as early as 1822 an urban boulevard was created by the Englishman Lewis Way in the shape of the Chemin des Anglais – later called the Promenade des Anglais.104 Many hotel names also point to an English clientele: Hotel West End, Hotel Westminster, Hôtel des Anglais or Hotel Victoria on the Riviera; Hotel Beau Rivage and Hotel d’Angleterre in Geneva and Lausanne; or Hotel d’Inghilterra in Rome. Italy was teeming with hotels called Isole Britanniche and names such as Londra, Villa di Londra etc. It is this ‘English flood’, paired with a push for urbanisation, that Leo N. Tolstoy in 1857 made the theme of his short novel Lucerne: Now one has, owing to the tremendous onrush of Englishmen and in consideration of their needs, their taste and their money pulled down the old bridge and in its place constructed a dead straight base dam and erected on this dam several straight-lined five-storey houses planted two rows of lime trees in front of the houses and supported them by poles. Between the lime trees one has according to custom distributed green-painted benches. This is the promenade; here English ladies in Swiss straw hats are strolling as well as Englishmen in their practical and comfortable suits and they are enjoying their creation. It may be possible that the quays and the houses, lime trees and Englishmen somewhere else might look pretty, but in any case not here in the midst of this strangely majestic and at the same time indescribably harmonic and gentle landscape.105 Promenade and boulevard are urban elements serving the Corso.106 To ‘see and be seen’ was a social requirement the tourists brought with them. Inside the hotel, social and public spaces served this desire. Switched between landscape and architecture, patios, arcades or colonnades offered the adequate outer frame for these activities. The 800-metre promenade–terrace of the Hotel Palace in Caux defines the culmination of what Tolstoy calls an insensitive intrusion into a harmonic landscape (fig. 1.28). Appropriately, Prosper Mérimée finally characterised the purpose of travelling as a status symbol, as a hunt for new sensations with which one could make an impression after coming back from a journey. Here, we come across a modern phenomenon of the consumer society: travelling and afterwards reporting it became a question of prestige. ‘Initially, Miss Lydia was flattered by the thought to see things beyond the Alps that nobody before her had seen and about which she would be able to converse with really cultured persons.’107 Again Mérimée: After having taken lodgings in the Hotel Beauveau in Marseille, the continued admiration of the pleasure travellers had reversed into its opposite: ‘the erupting Vesuvius (they found) hardly more meaningful than the chimneys of the factories in Birmingham. But “never before an Englishwoman had been to Corsica, so she had to go there”’.108 28 Franziska Bollerey

1.28 The 800-metre promenade of the Palace Hotel, Caux, 1950

Here, we meet, as early as 1840, the onrush of sensations that Georg Simmel attributed to modern big-city life, but also the restless hunt for novelty, a phenomenon that was to constantly increase well into the twenty-first century: consumption, not digestion. Urbanisation of the countryside therefore is the inevitable consequence of a development from purpose-oriented travel to travelling as an end in itself. People travelling to market, salesmen, pilgrims and messengers undertook purpose-oriented journeys. From late mediaeval times on, there was a certain spa tourism (figs. 1.29a and 1.29b). In the sixteenth century, there followed the tour for nature studies or geographic and geological purposes.109 From approximately the middle of the eighteenth century, the purpose of travelling changed. One travelled to regions unknown ‘out of pleasure and to widen one’s horizon. Travelling as educational task was herewith institutionalised.’110 Educational journeys, frequently in the company of an architect, were, as the ‘Grand Tour’,111 part of a fashionable social custom. Destinations for these travels at first were the sites of ancient cultures in Italy, Greece and the Middle East. By and by, the Alpine world became a travel destination, as part of an experience of nature inspired by its idealisation by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings were part of the literary canon of the educated nobility, additionally supported by Albrecht Haller’s poem, ‘The Alps’.112 Thus, still in the eighteenth century, travelling in Switzerland became an integral part of the Grand Tour, from which the terms ‘tourism’ and ‘tourist’ derive, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger demonstrates.113 In 1798, the year of the French Revolution, William Coxe published his travel guide Travels in Switzerland.114 From 1804–5, one can read in Johann Gottfried Ebel’s travel instructions: 29 Beyond the lobby

1.29a Bath at Leuk, Valais, ca. 1600 1.29b Bath at Leuk, Valais, ca. 1850

All the Great, Sublime, Extraordinary and Astonishing, everything horrible and dreadful, defiant, gaunt and melancholic, everything romantic, gentle, amiable, serene, quiet, sweetly refreshing, idyllic and mellow of the whole ample nature seems to have united in a small space to make this land the garden of Europe [fig. 1.30].115 Such propaganda did not lack efficiency. From 1844, Carl Baedeker’s travel guide was a companion to the German tourist, as had already been the case for English-speaking voyagers, with John Murray’s Handbook for travellers on the Continent, from 1836. Both contained information concerning lodgings. It was Murray who first introduced a classification of tourist sights in categories, which is still current today. In the last third of the nineteenth century, no less a person than Mark Twain travelled following the instructions of current travel guides: 30 Franziska Bollerey

1.30 Lauteraar glacier, 1775, Caspar Wolf

Thinking over my plans, as mapped out, I perceived that they did not take the Furka Pass, the Rhone Glacier, the Finsteraarhorn, the Wetterhorn etc. I immediately examined the guide-book to see if these were important, and found they were.116 Twain lamented the introduction of municipal hotel architecture, which emerged in a first building phase from 1860 onwards and in a second boom from the 1880s, in inner, western and eastern Switzerland, as well as in the Ticino: One does not find out what a hold the chalet has taken upon him until he presently comes upon a new house – a house which is aping the town fashions of Germany and France, a prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down thing, plastered all over on the outside to look like stone, and altogether so stiff, and formal, and ugly, and forbidding, and so out of tune with the gracious landscape, and so deaf and dumb and dead to the poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at a wedding, a puritan in paradise.117 Twain sets this in opposition to the quality of the ancestral regional chalet: ‘Set such a house against the fresh green of the hillside, and it looks ever so cosy and inviting and picturesque, and is a decidedly graceful addition to the landscape.’118 The same phenomenon was equally described in the 1880s by Alphonse Daudet: Switzerland nowadays is nothing but an enormous Kursaal, opened from June till September, a casino with a panorama, in which people from all continents amuse themselves. This business 31 Beyond the lobby

1.31a Vitznau–Rigi railway, 1874 1.31b Giessbach railway above Lake Brienz, 1879 1.31c ’The railway at its destination. Three victims of progress’, humorous postcard, ca. 1900 1.31d Hammerschwand lift at Bürgenstock, 1905, Franz-Josef Bucher-Durrer

is run by a society owning hundreds of millions and billions with company seats in Geneva and London. Just imagine how much money had to be spent to furnish this entire landscape of lakes and forests, mountains and waterfalls, to polish it to a glossy finish, maintain an entire army of extras and employees and to build luxury hotels with gas, telegraph and telephone on the highest peaks. Just look about the country. You will find no corner not furnished with mechanical devices and tricks like an opera stage: lighted waterfalls, turnstiles at the entrance to glaciers and a great number of trains of all varieties to climb up the mountains [fig. 1.31a–1.31d].119 The urbanification of the countryside, as described by Mark Twain and Alphonse Daudet, takes place, either by extending existing houses (figs. 1.32a–1.32c), after demolishing old buildings or by the building of solitary houses in open country. We find the same demolishing– constructing process in metropolitan building types such as the railway stations already mentioned.120 Here, the early stations of the first half of the nineteenth century were replaced after 1850 by monumental buildings in the historicist style. Likewise, department stores such as, in Paris, Au Bon Marché, Printemps or Samaritaine,121 grew from small retail shops or small-scale department stores into complexes occupying whole city blocks. One can also observe the same process of crowding out historic substance or swallowing it up with big-city or metropolitan hotel construction. London’s Savoy Hotel and Theatre, for example, thus replaced the Beaufort Buildings from 1695, ‘which [were] a combination of residential street and workshops’ (fig. 1.33).122 In New York, railway king Henry Willard’s listed building from 1883 was ingested by the new, fifty-one-storey hotel, Helmsley Palace.123 There are many examples of the process of integrating or transforming historical building matter, besides the already mentioned hotel Badischer Hof. In Venice, the fourteenth-century Palazzo Dandolo became the Hotel Danieli in 1822. In Paris, the Hotel Bristol (1878) goes back to a palace of 1718, and the Crillon to another from 1765. César Ritz, in 1898, respected the 1704 façade in the Place Vendôme. Two villas were combined in the year 1897 to create the Alexandria Hotel Beau Rivage (1922). In Cairo, the 1869 Gezira Palace that housed Empress Eugènie during the opening of the Suez Canal 32 Franziska Bollerey

1.32a (top left) Rigi-Kulm, first hotel, 1847–8 1.32b (middle left) Second Kulm-Hotel, 1857 1.32c (bottom left) Rigi-Kulm Grand Hotel, by Schreiber, 1875 1.33 The Strand, 1829 (top right) and 1889 (bottom right), after construction of the Savoy Hotel, London

became the hotel Ismail Palace, which in turn, in 1982, was augmented by two twenty-storey towers. In Kandy, Sri Lanka, the governor’s palace from 1825 became the Hotel Mount Lavinia in 1877. Although we will not be concerned with the so-called ‘Oriental hotels’ here, as their concept differs from that of the grand hotel, two can be mentioned because they represent the paradigm of ‘demolition/replacement’: In Singapore, the Raffles Hotel, opened only in 1887, was replaced by a new hotel building in 1899. In Tokyo, the Hotel Imperial124 from the late 1890s had to give way to Frank Lloyd Wright’s building from 1915–22, which itself was to be demolished in 1967. But, to return to Switzerland: the necessity to spend the night somewhere in this country mainly arose when crossing the Alps, be it in combination with military actions – the most famous being Hannibal’s crossing in antiquity125 – or be it for economic purposes or during pilgrimages. The hospice on Great St Bernard, at an altitude of 33 Beyond the lobby

1.34 City maps of Montreux, 1830, 1870, 1914, and photographs from 1894 and 1906 1.35 Hotel Montreux Palace, postcard, ca. 1906

8,110 feet (2,472 metres), dates back to the year AD 962.126 More than 900 years had to pass before, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pensions in Switzerland became resort hotels and villages became hotel cities of international standing. In his most successful publication, Hotel Palaces. Between Dream and Reality,127 Roland Flückiger-Seiler compares the settlement structure of Montreux in the years 1830, 1870 and 1914 and correctly speaks of a ‘hotel city’ (fig. 1.34).128 Here, high above Lac Léman, Switzerland’s presumably most imposing hotel-chateau is situated, the Montreux Palace (fig. 1.35).129 Here too, as with the urban grand hotels, urbanisation as well as a process of growth into large-scale dimensions took place. In 1904, the Pilivet boarding house was demolished, situated directly next to the Hotel de Cygne from 1834. In its place, in 1905–6, an annex was built that included a theatre and an ostentatious ballroom, as well as a 34 Franziska Bollerey

1.36 St Moritz Dorf, 1848, 1880 and 1934 1.37a Hotel Engadiner Kulm, picture postcard, ca. 1900 1.37b Plan of the groundfloor, with Faller boarding house integrated into the north-west corner

vestibule, several halls, staircases, dining halls, parlours, patios and verandas. ‘Life in a hotel was to be as varied as for example a trip on an ocean liner.’130 The background for this development was the speculation on the Simplon railway line, completed in 1906, on which swanky guests now were able to reach Montreux hassle-free, in firstclass club cars. Among the many prominent guests over the course of time was the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who, between 1961 and 1977, had his permanent residence here. Similarly, the motor of urbanisation, in the shape of an explosively growing hotel sector in St Moritz, was provided by the railway that, in 1904, reached the Engadine spa (fig. 1.36). The extent of the upswing in St Moritz Bad, as well as in St Moritz Dorf, can be illustrated by the Hotel Engadiner Kulm – the number of overnight stays grew from 80 in the year 1850 to 6,000 in the year 1920.131 In 1840, Johannes Caspar Badrutt established the Faller boarding house in an existing farm 35 Beyond the lobby

building, which he enlarged in 1856 and renamed the Hotel Kulm. Step by step, nearly all the adjoining farm buildings were incorporated as hotel annexes. In 1886–7, Nicolaus Hartmann senior enlarged the complex further. In 1911 – by now, the winter season was also a period of travel – Nicolaus Hartmann junior expanded the complex to a several-hundred-room hotel (figs. 1.37a and 1.37b).132 Most grand hotels that intensify the moment of urbanisation explosively are built after the railway has reached the respective places.133 St Moritz, like the Riviera, Montreux or Cabourg, constitutes an example of procedural hotelisation, i.e. an urbanisation of the countryside. After the Second World War, in the Alps and on the coasts, holiday resorts such as La Grande Motte, Flaine or Les Menuires134 mushroomed over very short periods of time. In Spain, this taking over of a landscape is aptly called urbanización. Along with the construction of hotels, the erection of thousands of holiday residences had devastating consequences for the Spanish coastal regions. As a side-effect of newly erected hotels, the construction of private villas – based on speculative expectations – in the immediate vicinity of the hotels also goes back to the nineteenth century. In Switzerland, the building contractors of the Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja built numerous villas in the ‘Swiss wood style’ next to the hotel, for rent or purchase, as elements of an additional urbanisation of the mountainside. The solitary building of the Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja is an example of megalomaniac volumina (fig. 1.38). An oversized, alien object, it is rammed into the sublime landscape of the elevated plain between St Moritz and Bergell, painted by artists such as Giovanni Segantini and Giovanni Giacometti (figs. 1.39a and 1.39b). For its founder, Belgian nobleman Count Camille de Renesse, the hotel was to become the ‘Monte Carlo of the Alps’.135 Building work started in 1882, and, in 1884, hotel operations began in the 200-metrelong edifice, which, next to the Zurich Polytechnic, was the second largest building in Switzerland. The architectural shape followed neoRenaissance forms; the big ballroom-cum-theatre, the flat roof of which served customers as a sun deck, was neo-rococo. Up to the epoch of art nouveau, architectural styles à la Louis XIV, XV and XVI were most popular. The naming of hotel halls and lounges as ‘Pompadour’, ‘Versailles’ or ‘Trianon’ additionally pointed to high baroque and rococo. The guests were to make associations with the court culture of the French kings or, generally, noble chateaux and palace culture. Accordingly, certain accretions to the word ‘hotel’ are further indices. Thus, part of the hotel’s programme was a culture of festivities, offering balls, opera or theatre performances. In the ballroom of the Kursaal Maloja, one could admire stars of the Metropolitan Opera of New York or the Paris Comédie Française, as well as film presentations after the turn of the century. In the hotel’s heyday, twice-daily concerts with musicians from La Scala in Milan took place.136 36 Franziska Bollerey

1.38 Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja, photograph ca. 1900 1.39a Hay harvest, 1889–98, Giovanni Segantini 1.39b Dining hall of Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja, 1885

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1.40 Air-conditioning plant, Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja, 1885

The dining room to the right of the lobby housed 300 diners at the table d’hôte. In the upper storeys were situated 300 rooms for 450 guests. The technical furnishings – with the notable exception of the sanitary arrangements – were extremely modern. The advanced building equipment included lifts, central heating and illumination. The lighting of the interior and the big forecourt by carbon-filament light bulbs produced by Siemens was made possible by the hotel’s own electrical power station. Unparalleled in Switzerland was the airconditioning system (fig. 1.40). Part of the attractions was an elaborate park, situated towards the Silser See. Most grand hotels offered parks. Assuming the shape of urban parks or villa gardens, they were alien elements in the respective countryside, like the hotel buildings themselves. Tennis courts, a nine-hole golf course, a skating rink, carriage service, an Anglican and a Catholic church rounded off the choices. By the summer of 1885, high nobility and pecunious bourgeoisie were already flocking to the Kursaal Maloja. In the visitors’ book, besides many other celebrities, we find Edmund Baron Rothschild, Count Zeppelin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Impératrice Eugénie. The latter set the standard for luxuriant otiosity in her palais in Biarritz during the Second Empire, which grand hotels took as a model. In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to his mother: In the hotel Maloja . . . the season runs very well this time (ca. 300 persons) . . . To give an idea of the frequency: On the 9th of August at the Maloja, at the hotel ca. 900 carriages operated, 500 of which were coaches or equipages. Very Nizza-like, whereas our Sils sticks to its idyllic character.137 ‘Nizza-like’ is what Nietzsche calls that element of spatial and social alienation that adheres to the grand hotel that is embedded in the open countryside. Out of proportion with the scale of regional architecture, the hotel Kursaal Maloja constituted a metropolitan reference. The cultural attractions with protagonists from New York, Paris and Milan imported urban attractions. The staff mainly consisted of nonresidents, thus creating a cultural mix typical of urban environments. Furthermore, the locals were confronted with a civilisation alien to them, with the apparel and habits of an urban population that they on the one hand disapproved of and on the other hand imitated. The hotel guests, in turn, regarded the locals as an exoticum (figs. 1.41a and 1.41b). To watch them became part of the consumption, like watching the landscape, or listening to the imported music from Milan. The specific folkloristic flavour became part of the marketing strategy of the grand hotels. The experience of the landscape increasingly degenerated into a stage production.138 On a world scale, indigenous populations of the most diverse races are presented to the tourists as 38 Franziska Bollerey

1.41a Maloja, 1899–1900, by Giovanni Segantini and Giovanni Giacometti 1.41b Transport of luggage to the Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja 1.42a Experience of nature and metropolitan quality of service: Rigi-Kulm panorama, by Erich Keller, 1822 1.42b Order-clock in the Élysée Palace Hotel, Paris

attractions. The most recent trend is slum sightseeing.139 Living in luxury hotels, one lets reality pass by like a film, in the same way today as yesterday (figs. 1.42a and 1.42b). Surface culture As insignia of an urbanising world, hotels were positioned in the midst of so far untouched landscapes – as shown in the Swiss example. At an early date, Swiss hotel owners, and after them foreign investors, realised the marketing potential of the scenery. The Alps constituted an attraction: one simply had to see the sunrise on the Rigi, had to experience the awe of the grandiose world of the mountains. Here, we can discern a first tendency to market attractions. Next to world exhibitions and Olympic Games – as already seen in the Sparta of antiquity – they are an essential prerequisite for the building of hotels, as well as for making an economic profit from them. Where there was no authenticity of place such as on the Riviera, in the Alps or in Paris, London or Venice, artificial attractions had to be created, as was to be the case with Las Vegas. Again, in its role as promoter of early mass tourism, the railway reached the Nevada desert here in 1903. It is gambling halls and casinos, theatrical shows of every kind that up to today have driven a mass public into the hotels of Las Vegas. Trendsetters too – if on another level – were the grand hotels, as we have shown using the example of the Ritz, the Hotel Kursaal de la Maloja, the Côte d’Azur casinos or those in Monte Carlo (from 1863). As an object of investment with satisfying rates of return, the hotel depends on marketing. Again, this trend was initiated a long time ago. From around 1830, travel guides overrode the century-old role of conveying the reputation of an inn or a hotel by word-of-mouth or travel reports. Besides the actual qualities of ‘comfort, service, cuisine’, part of a marketing strategy is the purposeful decision of the hotel owner concerning the establishment’s name. Why does one call a 39 Beyond the lobby

Japanese (Fukuoka) hotel Il Palazzo?140 Why were hotels called Palace Hotels or Castle Hotels? The answer is clear. The intention was to suggest to the client that he was being completely lifted out of his daily experience. The recourse to historistic styles and the celebration of a quasi-court culture (balls, formal dinners) were the means. Famous guests also contributed to the fame of a hotel or a cafe or restaurant,141 because their stay in these establishments could be exploited in a promotionally successful way. ‘The name means something to us . . . each hotel depends on the reputation of its guests. A famous actress like you . . . brings attention for the hotel and . . . guests’, we already read in Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie.142 Hotel leaflets, as well as signs on room doors, point to prominent personalities such as Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Agatha Christie, Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and others. Of course, also today, in terms of marketability, the visits of ‘celebrities’ augment the fame of a hotel and draw a ‘social-climber’ clientele. Thus, hotel management is compelled, as in the epoch of the grand hotels, to combine the demands of a cultivated elite with those of the nouveau riche. For quite a while now, luxury hotels have been in the hands of international corporate groups. A majority stake in the Kempinksi hotels, for example, is by owned by the Thai Crown Property Bureau. Concerning the entry of Asian investors into the Paris hotel market, the American news magazine Time ran the title: ‘Paris Hotel Wars. Asian chains take on the city’s grandes dames by offering a modern spin on luxury’.143 For more than a century, Paris grand hotels such as the Ritz, Crillon, George V, Meurice, Plaza Athenée or Bristol saw themselves as guardians of an outstanding hotel service. ‘Their iconic status kept their rooms filled through most of the recession.’144 The guests mainly come from the ranks of the international money oligarchy of the twenty-first century,145 and it is they who are targeted by the Asian investors. The Singapore Raffles Group invested in the reopening of the Paris hotel Le Royal Monceau, dating back to 1928; the firm Shangri-La from Hong Kong converted the town palace of Napoleon’s grand-nephew into a hotel with prices between $1,000 and $31,000 per night. In the immediate neighbourhood of the Louvre, in 2011, the Mandarin Oriental opened. The naming clearly points to the expected clientele. The investment per room was $1.6 million. ‘The newly rich of China and India (and one has to add Russia) are becoming active tourists filling hotel rooms and dining out.’146 ‘Dining out at the Savoy’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was a novelty introduced by César Ritz. The general manager of the Royale Monceau vows to blend international guests with Parisians. He hopes that, ‘the hotel’s public spaces will seduce locals giving guests the clichéd sense of place they seek.’147 To underpin this cliché, Philippe Starck furnished the grand foyer with typical French finds from flea markets and even strategically placed tomes of Marcel Proust in carefully chosen positions. Walter Benjamin called this phenomenon ‘surface culture’. 40 Franziska Bollerey

An in-depth attitude is not in fashion any more, either with the perception of the surroundings or with that of people: Nobody bothers about anyone else. Everyone is alone with himself. The events that happen do not constitute entire human destinies complete and rounded off. They are fragments merely, scrap pieces . . . A glance that travels up does not reach the eyes. It stops at one’s clothes.148 The hotel provides the background for this non-committal attitude. For the ambiance for these encounters that do not oblige one to do anything, one increasingly looks at the historical grand hotels. On a worldwide scale, they – like palaces149 – are brought to new life: the Cathay (1929), with its art deco glass cupola in Shanghai,150 the Hotel Metropole (1885) – today the Corinthia in London – and also the British Metropole, the Savoy151 and the St Pancras Renaissance. ‘Despite modern touches like an underground swimming pool and spa, Old world elegance reigns. The sweeping lobby – made by enclosing an old taxi rank – melds glass ceiling with red brick walls and elaborate (historic) ironwork.’152 ‘Russian and Chinese consumers like old looking buildings, but if the shower or the wi-fi doesn’t work properly it turns them off completely’, said the Oriental Mandarin’s153 manager. ‘It were devices that made modern hotels modern’,154 Norman S. Hayner stated in the 1930s and remarked simultaneously, ‘The rage for mechanical devices may be the ruin of a once good hotel; for the basis of righteousness in a hotel is not mechanical devices but personal human contacts.’155 In the Paris hotel war, the indigenous French hotel owners counterattacked: You can come from China and build outstanding bathrooms . . . But our guests are looking for soul. That isn’t in the marble or the gilt. Luxury today needs to have a story, so the Crilllon emphasizes that Marie Antoinette took piano lessons in the drawing rooms and the Ritz honors Coco Chanel’s 30-year residency there.156 The history written by grand hotels is exploited here – history and stories as merchandise, as marketing labels. In this, hotels act in conformity to the capitalist economy. They represent the culture of the surface, a way once paved by the grand hotels. ‘The detachment, freedom, loneliness and release from restraints that mark the hotel population are only to a lesser degree characteristic of modern life as a whole’, 157 wrote Norman S. Hayner, in 1936.

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Notes 1 Concerning the history of accomodation, cf.: Ludy, Robert: Historic Hotels of the World, Philadelphia, 2009 (1927); Hayner, Norman S.: Hotel Life, Chapel Hill, 1936, pp. 1–27; Hude, Hermann von der: ‘Hotels’, in: Handbuch der Architektur, part IV, half-binding: Entwerfen, Anlage und Einrichtung der Gebäude. Gebäude für Erholungs-, Beherbergungs- und Vereinszwecke, Darmstadt, 1885, pp. 174–5; Firebaugh, W. C.: The Inns of Greece and Rome and the History of Hospitality from the Dawn of Time to the Middle Ages, New York, 1972 (1928); Glücksmann, Robert: Das Gaststättenwesen, Stuttgart, 1927, pp. 1–56. 2 Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., p. 11. 3 Cf. Meyers Großes Konversationslexikon, 6th edition, Leipzig and Vienna, 1904, vol. 7, pp. 379–80. 4 Glücksmann, Robert: op. cit., p. 27ff. 5 Very often, the hanging of signs was controlled by guilds. ‘For France, Fournier names the year 1313 as demonstrably the earliest date, for Germany Grohne names 1410’, Glücksmann, Robert: op. cit., p. 27ff. 6 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 7

Caravanserais are those kinds of public buildings within the city or along the trading routes, in which these travelling companies with their horses and camels find accommodation. In the cities they normally take the shape of square buildings of one or two storeys executed with splendour with rooms in the upper storeys that open towards galleries around a yard. In these rooms the merchants and their wares are accommodated, whereas the ground level and basement is occupied by the animals. In the centre of such an inn usually a water basin is found to water the animals and serve as washing basins before prayer. The caravanserais, usually called chane (today han) in Turkey, mostly are pious endowments by rich merchants, highly positioned dignitaries and baronial persons. (Meyers Großes Konversationslexikon, op. cit., vol. 10, p. 616)

8 ‘The traveller carries his own bedding, which is spread out upon a few boards stretched over two trestles’ (Williams, Edward, T.: China. Yesterday and Today, New York, 1923, p. 125). As late as the end of the eighteenth century, the Englishwoman Mariana Starke (Letters from Italy between 1792 and 1798) recommends packing the following items: a bedstead that can be converted into a divan, two sheepskin bags, a pair of pillows,

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a pair of woollen blankets, a pair of bedside carpets, bed sheets, two bed covers, a mosquito net made of fine veil-like cloth, a padlock (theses padlocks one can already find in London and fix it to doors in less than five minutes); towels, tablecloths, napkins (not fine ones, but ones durably to use); pistols, knives, a pocket knife for meals, silver spoons, table and tea spoons, salt spoons, a silver or doublé teapot, a tin kettle for making tea; a box with fire steel and tinder or a simple pocket lighter, a tea box and one more for sugar, a soldier’s confort [. . .] tea, Cayenne pepper, ginger, nutmegs, oatmeal.

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Cited in: Imorde, Joseph: ‘Schmutzige Laken. Die Kehrseite der Grand Tour’, in: Daidalos, Architektur. Kunst. Kultur, issue 62, 1996, pp. 56–7. A lot of these things are objects that, in the grand hotels of 1900 as well as nowadays, fall prey to souvenir hunters. Desiderius Erasmus von Rotterdam (1466 or 1469–1536): Familiarium Colloquiorum Formulae, also Colloquia Familiaria, Basel, 1518, 1527. Cited after: Glücksmann, Robert: op. cit., p. 13. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de (1533–92): Travel Diary, translated and introduced by Otto Flake, Leipzig, 1908, vol. 7 of the Collected Works. Cited in: Glücksmann, Robert: op. cit., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Goethe’s Works, Ed. by Gerhard Fricke, Tübingen, n.d., vol. 7, p. 26. Cited after: Imorde, Joseph, op. cit., p. 64. Mérimée, Prosper: Carmen, Paris, 1845. In: Mérimée, Prosper: Collected Short Novels, Munich, 1982, p. 522. Cf. the section ‘From purpose-oriented travel to tourism. The urbanisation of the countryside’. Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair: A novel without a hero, London, 1847/48. Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., p. 22. Tremont House, built by Isaiah Rogers, replaced the burned down Exchange Coffee House of 1806–9 (architect Asher Benjamin), a seven-storey house with 200 rooms, seating 300 persons for dinner. The earliest American hotel was New York’s City Hotel, erected between 1794 and 1796 by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820). William H. Eliot’s A Description of Tremont House, with Architectural Illustrations, Boston, 1830, for half a century served as compendium of hotel architecture (Watkin, David: op. cit., pp. 13–15). Another milestone of hotel architecture in America was the Astor Hotel in New York, modelled after Boston’s Tremont Hotel, for which, from 1830, several designs by Alexander Jackson Davis exist.

17 Ludy, Robert B.: op. cit., p. 210. 18 ‘The hotel (a very excellent one) is called Tremont House. It has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe’, Dickens writes in 1842. Ibid., p. 211. 19 Characterisation by the Berlin publicist Friedrich Buchholz. Cited after: Fischer, Bernhard: ‘Der Badische Hof. 1807–1830. Cottas Hotel in Baden-Baden’, in: Marbacher Magazin, 79/1997, Marbach am Neckar 1997, p. 2. Cotta edited Schiller, Alexander von Humboldt, Schelling and Herder, but also political magazines and cultural journals. After the death of Schiller, with whom Cotta had an intimate friendship, he befriended Goethe. Both frequented spas. Cotta travelled to the south-west of Germany, in the Allgäu, and to Switzerland; Goethe travelled to Pyrmont and, mostly, Bohemia, for example Karlsbad. One impetus for the erection of the hotel was that both then had the opportunity to meet more frequently in Baden-Baden. 20 Fischer, Bernhard: op. cit., p. 17. 21 Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766–1826) acted as senior director of construction in the grand duchy of Baden from 1800. Part of his responsibility was for public buildings and, among other duties, the urban planning of Karlsruhe. 22 Fischer, Bernhard: op. cit., p. 17. 23 Architects: Carlos Ferrater and José Maria Cartañá. 24 Cf. Bollerey, Franziska: Architekturkonzeptionen der utopischen Sozialisten. Alternative Planung und Architektur für den gesellschaftlichen Prozeß (1977), Berlin, 1991, pp. 150–67. 25 Keck, Herbert: ‘Profitable Raumverschwendung. Das Atriumhotel’, in: Daidalos: op. cit., pp. 42–51. Cf. Downey, Claire: ‘Das Portman Hotel. Die Evolution einer Design Philosophie’, in: Archithese. Zeitschrift und Schriftenreihe für Architektur, issue 2, 1988, pp. 19–25. 26 Fischer, Bernhard: op. cit., p. 17. 27 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard: Entwurf einer historischen Architectur, Vienna, 1721, 2nd edition, 1725. 28 Durand, Claude Nicolas Louis (1760–1834): Recueil et parallèles des édifices de tous genres, anciens et modernes, remarquables par leur beauté, par leur grandeur ou par leur singularité, et dessinés sur une même échelle, in: Atlante, in folio di 92 tavole, Paris, 1800. 29 Durand, Claude Nicolas Louis: Recueil et parallèles . . ., op. cit., table 30 (‘Hospices, lazarets, caravanserails, cimitières’). 30

Les hôtelleries, destinées à recevoir des voyageurs ne sont dans la plus grande partie de l’Europe que des édifices particuliers qui n’offrent pas, pour la plupart, plus d’ordre, de

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commodité, de propreté que la majeure partie de nos fermes. En Orient, au contraire, ces mêmes lieux, nommés caravansérails, sont des édifices publics bâtis et entretenus avec le plus grand soin par le Gouvernement. Ces édifices disposés de la manière la plus simple, offrent au regard de tous les voyageures le plus bel aspect. On sait combien celui de nos hôtelleries en général est ignoble et repoussant. Il ne faudrait pour cela que donner a leur disposition la convenance et la simplicité qu’elles exigent. In: Durand, Claude Nicolas Louis : Précis des leçons . . ., op. cit., 2nd vol., p. 19, table 32. Hermann von der Hude rightly points out that, at least since the Renaissance, a type of guest house existed very similar to the caravanserai. Through a vaulted entrance, one reached a yard surrounded by open wood or stone galleries. A staircase led to the upper-storey galleries with the guest-rooms. A second staircase linked the stables, which were also situated in the courtyard, to the galleries. From the entrance, the tavern and inn could be reached, with kitchen and stores behind them. At the front of the building, a kind of entrance hall or large hallway was situated (a sort of a prototype of the later lobbies). (Hude, Hermann von der: op. cit., p. 175). 31 Norman S. Hayner speaks of 50 per cent of permanent or similarly high-grade use of ‘residential hotels’ in the 1930s in the USA. But, also, in grand hotels apartments or suites are rented permanently. Thus, the Aga Khan occupied a suite in the Paris Ritz for 40 years. Vladimir Nabokov resided in the Montreux Palace, from 1961 to 1977, just to name two of a great number of permanent hotel guests. 32 Probably the most famous of the European railway hotels is the Midland Grand Hotel of the Midland Railway, erected by George Gilbert Scott between 1868 and 1873, in front of the St Pancras railway station in London, which today serves as the terminal of the Eurostar train from the continent. Hotel activities have been resumed recently in a modern annex. The old Midland Grand has been converted to apartments. Cf.: Bradley, Simon: St. Pancras Station, London, 2006; Frost, Barbara: Memories of the Midland (the one in Manchester, at the other end of the line), Manchester, 1993; North British Railway Company’s Station Hotels (Edinburgh and Glasgow), Guide book, n.d. Another famous hotel is the Gare d’Orsay, erected in 1898–9 for the Paris World Exhibition of 1900, with 370 rooms. After interior conversion by Italian architect Gae Aulenti, it was opened in 1986 as a museum of the nineteenth century. Cf.: Mathieu, Caroline: Orsay. From Station to a Museum, Paris, 1999.

33 Guyer, Eduard: Das Hotelwesen der Gegenwart, Zurich, 1874 (2nd amplified edition 1885), pp. 12–14 and 232–6. Cited after Hude, Hermann von der: op. cit., p. 175. 34 Cf. Filip Geerts’s contribution on the Amsterdam Hilton hotel. The Dallas Hilton, in 1925, was the first hotel built by Conrad Hilton (1888–1979); more followed in the USA. The Hilton Hotels Corporation empire, founded in 1946, during the 1950s and 1960s became the first international hotel chain, with 188 hotels in the USA and 54 in other countries. Hilton put his experiences into writing in his two books: Be My Guest. Autobiography of Conrad Hilton, in 1959, and Inspirations of an Innkeeper, in 1963. In the first book, he describes a visit to the Stevens Hotel in Chicago, 1926–7, which left an impression for its sheer dimensions: 3,000 rooms; 6,000 people (guests and employees); social and public spaces of more than 12,000 square metres; a daily consumption of 3,000 litres of coffee, ten heads of cattle etc.; in addition, a private hospital ward complete with an operation theatre; twenty-six storeys; three basement levels. 35 ‘The hotel population is essentially an aggregation of displaced people’, writes Norman S. Hayner, op. cit., p. 181. 36 D’Ormesson, Jean, David Watkin et al.: Grand Hotel. The Golden Age of Palace Hotels. An Architectural and Social History, New York, 1984, p. 149. 37 Montgomery-Massingberd, Hugh: ‘A homage to César Ritz’. In: D’Ormesson, Jean, op. cit., p. 147. 38 Ibid., p. 178. 39 Ibid. 40 MacKenzie, Compton: The Savoy of London, London, Toronto, Wellington, Sidney, 1953, p. 57. Extravaganzas went on in the Savoy:

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Krupp gave a party in May 1906 when the majolica fountain in the old courtyard gushed champagne, and in that same year the old courtyard was flooded for dinner to be served in a gondola to the guests of George Kessler, the champagne magnate. (MacKenzie, Compton, op. cit., p. 73) 41 D’Ormesson, Jean: op. cit., p. 148. 42 Today, the Bristol is still one of the first addresses, with a restaurant dating back to the year 1829, having, at the same time however, the most ample and modern bathrooms of the city. Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, shown in Cannes in May 2011, will further contribute to the hotel’s glory (Time Magazine, 2 May 2011). 43 The architect was the Alsatian architect Charles F. Mewès (1858–1914) who, together with the Englishman Arthur J. Davis (1878–1951), was

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also responsible for the London Ritz (both were pupils of the Ècole des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Ritz originally intended to put up a more modern building. Mewès however convinced him to preserve the Place Vendôme façade by Jules Hardouin Mansart (1690–1704), a speculation object under Louis XIV by his minister of finances, Colbert. The interior was designed following contemporary Parisian taste, employing neo styles between Louis XIV and Empire. The hotel was financed by the wine merchant Alexandre Marnier-Lapostolle. Ritz baptised a liqueur created for the Savoy, ‘Le Grand Marnier’. Cf. the case study ‘The Ritz, Paris’. The Grand Hotel Cabourg, which the asthmatic Proust visited every summer from 1907 until the outbreak of the First World War, was situated in the centre of an agglomeration created out of a void at the end of the nineteenth century in the department of Calvados, not far from the mouth of the river Seine. It developed into a gentrified seaside resort for Parisians. The establishment served as the model for the hotel Balbec in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, but impressions of other luxury hotels, such as the Danieli in Venice, also went into the account of his memoirs. George D. Painter, cited in: Künzli, Lis (Ed.): Hotels. Ein literarischer Führer, Frankfurt, 1996, p. 111. Ernest Hemingway, cited in: Künzli, Lis, op. cit., p. 112. Ritz, Marie Louise (Becker): César Ritz. Host to the World, Philadelphia, 1938, cited in: D’Ormesson, Jean, op. cit, p. 148. The earliest typological analysis is Eduard Guyer’s Das Hotelwesen der Gegenwart from 1874. It is followed by: Klasen, Ludwig: Grundrissvorbilder von Gebäuden aller Art, Anth. II, Grundrissvorbilder von Gasthäusern, Hôtels und Restaurants, Leipzig, 1884. After that: Hude, Hermann von der: ‘Hotels’, in: Handbuch der Architektur, part IV, 4th half-binding: Entwerfen, Anlage und Einrichtung der Gebäude. Gebäude für Erholungs-, Beherbergungs- und Vereinszwecke, Darmstadt, 1885, and, as modern amendment: Just, Karl Wilhelm: ‘Hotels, restaurants’, in: Handbuch der Architektur, part IV, 4th halfbinding, issue 1, Leipzig, 1933. MacKenzie, Compton, op. cit., p. 42. Williams, Jefferson: The American Hotel: An Anecdotal History, New York, 1930, p. 77. Bollerey, Franziska: ‘Palasthotels’, in: Boulevard Spezial concerning hotels, broadcast by Deutschlandfunk, 20 September 1997. Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., pp. 179–80. Cf. Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelpaläste zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit. Schweizer

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66

67

Tourismus und Hotelbau 1830–1920, Zurich, 2005 (2001), pp. 102–3, 110. MacKenzie, Compton, op. cit., p. 43 Bollerey, Franziska: Architekturkonzeptionen der utopischen Sozialisten. Alternative Planung für den gesellschaftlichen Prozeß, Berlin, 1991 (1977), pp. 118–23, 142–5. Hude, Hermann von der: op. cit., pp. 174–220. Together with Hennicke he built the hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, 1873–5. The four upper storeys had sixty to seventy rooms, with seventy-five to eighty-five beds. Nearly every room had a balcony, but there were only two bathrooms per storey. There were a generous number of lounges and saloons arranged around the central, glass-canopied courtyard. Ibid., p. 197. Just, Wilhelm, op. cit., p. 19. Eduard Guyer, cited after: Flückiger-Seiler: Hotelträume, op. cit., p. 60. Hude, Hermann von der: op. cit., p. 191. Cf. the section, ‘On and behind the stage’. In the epoch of Haussmann’s urban improvements, the Grand Hotel was Europe’s largest hotel. D’Ormesson, Jean: op. cit. p. 54. Flückiger-Seiler: Hotelträume. Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau zwischen 1830–1920, Zurich, 2005 (2001). Brecht, Bertold: Final stanza of ‘Dreigroschenfilm’ 1930, in: Bertold Brecht: Gesammelte Werke, vol.2, Frankfurt, 1967, p. 497. Der letzte Mann – The Last Man – Germany, 1924. Director: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau; producer: Erich Pommer; script: Carl Meyer; camera: Karl Freund. English title: The Last Laugh. Cf. also the contribution of Anne Massey: ‘Learning from Los Angeles: Hollywood hotel lobbies’. The topic of ‘Hunger and voracity’also appears as a convincing collage of contrast in Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (English title: Berlin. Symphony of a Great City), 1927. In The Last Man, this revolving door becomes an obsession. The film opens with a magnificent tracking shot that shows guests moving through the never stopping revolving door – a camera focus that returns over the whole duration of the film and that represents a cross between a carousel and a roulette wheel. In: Kracauer, Siegfried: Von Caligari bis Hitler, Frankfurt, 1979 (Princeton, 1947), p. 112. Cf. the contribution by Tom Avermaete. Cf. also Seger, Cordula: Grand Hotel. Schauplatz der Literatur, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2005, pp. 286–303.

45 Beyond the lobby

68 As early as 1936, Norman S. Hayer. in his book: Hotel Life, Chapel Hill (The University of North Carolina Press), 1936 (appeared 1928, under the title of ‘Hotel life and personality’, his dissertation), in the chapter ‘Problems of human nature’, reports a compensatory dispensation for a Princeton student. ‘The son of a rich man held a party’ in a hotel. ‘Every breakable thing was smashed. Even the tiles and the plumbing fixtures in the bathroom were torn out’, p. 170. 69 Mann, Thomas: Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil, Frankfurt, 1954, paperback edition Frankfurt, 1990. 70 Ibid., p. 391. 71 ‘The washerwomen wear blue, the errand girls from the laundry pink, the scrubbing women striped, the parlour maids white, the waitresses in the soda fountain ochre, those in the tearoom lilac working clothes’ (Leitner, Maria: Hotel Amerika, Dresden, 1950 (1930), p. 13). 72 Mann, Thomas, op. cit., p. 479. 73 Ibid., pp. 491–2. 74 It still exists today: 202, Rue de Rivoli. 75 Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit.. Hayner’s book appeared in 1928 under the title ‘Of hotel life and personality’, as his dissertation. 76 The Chicago School of Sociology was an institutionalised research movement that was founded in the 1920s at the University of Chicago. It oriented itself on the basic principles of the pragmatist theory of action of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey and had a shared interest in a common research subject, the city of Chicago. With the help of process-analytical and reconstructive methods, the social microcosm was explored to describe the interdependency between economic and political developments. 77 Lindner, Rolf: Die Entdeckung der Stadtkultur. Soziologie aus der Erfahrung der Reportage, Frankfurt and New York, 2007, pp. 92–3. 78 The Hotel des Bains was erected as a luxury hotel in 1910 on Lido di Venezia. Just, Karl Wilhelm: Hotels, Restaurants. Handbuch der Architektur, op. cit., p. 41, names as architects Ing. Fromesco Marsich and Comm. and Ing. Giovanni Sicher, Venice. As well as for other reasons, the hotel became famous because of Thomas Mann’s stay in 1911, which inspired him to write his short novel. 79 Simmel, Georg: ‘Soziologie des Raumes’, in Simmel, Georg: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, vol. 1 of the seven-volume complete edition, Frankfurt, 1995, pp. 132–83. 80 Mann, Thomas: Der Tod in Venedig, Berlin, 1912.

81 Mann, Thomas: Die Bekenntnisse, op. cit., p. 393. 82 Ibid., pp. 397–8. 83 Orwell calls the ‘plongeur’ ‘a typical slave of modern times’. Orwell, George: Down and Out in Paris and London, Paris and London, 1933, cited after in: Erledigt in Paris und London, Zurich, 1987, p. 156. 84 It was the Hotel Lotti in Rue Castiglione, near the Place Vendôme. Cf. Künzli, Lis: Hotels, ein literarischer Führer, Frankfurt, 1996, pp. 103–4. 85 Orwell, op. cit., p. 113. 86 op. cit., pp. 92–3. 87 op. cit., p. 108. 88 Leitner, Maria: Hotel Amerika, op. cit. Cf. also: ‘Electric stimulations’, in: Ward, Janet: Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2001, p. 135. 89 Kracauer, Siegfried: ‘Luxushotel von unten gesehen’, in: Frankfurter Zeitung, 28 December 1930, 2nd morning edition. 90 Cf. Greg Voltano’s contribution. 91 Leitner, Maria, op. cit., p. 8. 92 Ibid., pp. 212–13. 93 Ibid., p. 50 94 Schulte, Michael: ‘Weder Staubsauger noch Vorschriften. Geschichten aus dem Chelsea’, in: Daidalos. Architektur, Kunst Kultur, vol. 62, December 1996, pp. 83–9. 95 Montgomery-Massingberd, op. cit., p. 150. 96 Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., p. 176. 97 Love in the Afternoon, USA, 1956. Director: Billy Wilder, script: Billy Wilder. 98 Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., p. 4 speaks of a ‘tragic climax of demoralizing lonesomeness that often accompanies mobility and detachment’. 99 Bollerey, Franziska: ‘Palasthotels’, in: Boulevard Spezial concerning hotels. Broadcast by Deutschlandfunk, 20 September 1997. 100 For the Palais Royal, cf. Dupezard, Emile: Le Palais Royal, Architecture et Décoration de Louis XV à nos jours, Paris, 1911; N.N.: Palais Royal, Domaine de la Couronne. Histoire du Palais Royal, Paris, 1934; D’Espelel, Pierre: Le Palais Royal, Paris, 1936; Champier, Victor and G.-Roger Sandoz: Le Palais Royal d’après des documents inédits (1629–1900), 2 vols., Paris, 1900. 101 Saudan, Michel, Yolande Blanc et al.: De l’hotelpalais en Riviera, Geneva, 1985, p. 98. 102 Joanne, Paul: Les Stations d’hiver de la Méditerranée, Collections des guides-Joanne, Paris, 1897. 103 Ibid. 104 An initiative of the Englishman Reverend Lewis Way, who financed it himself. Cf. Saudan, Michel: op. cit., p. 95. 105 Tolstoy, Leo N.: ‘Aus den Aufzeichnungen des Fürsten D. Nechljudow (From the chronicle of

46 Franziska Bollerey

Prince D. Nechljudow)’, Lucerne 8 July 1857, in: Tolstoy, Leo N.: Frühe Erzählungen, Munich, 1961, p. 476. 106 ‘Corso’ – to show oneself strolling in public, to observe, to pause for a conversation – all this is a component part of the Italian culture. And this stroll becomes dearer and dearer the more often one visits it (the corso) conjointly with the inhabitants of this city that all come together here . . . for one of the most entertaining promenades . . . because one observes the whole living Rome moving up and down . . . As soon as the day’s heat has retired, everybody is crowding together to enjoy the cool evening air . . . the most lively area of the corso is near the church of St. Carlo, where the street Condotti crosses the Corso. (Moritz, Karl Philipp, in: Günther, Horst (Ed.): Karl Philipp Moritz Werke, vol. 2, Frankfurt, 1993, p. 359) 107 Mérimée, Prosper: Colomba, Paris, 1840, in: Sämtliche Novellen, Munich, 1982, p. 309. 108 Ibid., p. 312. 109 Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelträume zwischen Gletschern und Palmen. Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau 1830–1920, Zurich, 2005 (2001), p. 15. Here travellers are mentioned such as: Thomas Plattner (1499–1582), Johannes Stumpf (1500–66), Aegidius Tschudi, a disciple of Zwingli (1505–72) and Conrad Gessner (1516–63). 110 Ibid., p. 17. 111 For the Grand Tour, cf.: Brilli, Attilio: Als Reisen eine Kunst war – Vom Beginn des modernen Tourismus: Die ‘Grand Tour’, Berlin, 2001; Freller, Thomas: Adelige auf Tour, Ostfildern, 2006; Henning, Christoph: Reiselust – Touristen, Tourismus und Urlaubskultur, Frankfurt, 1999; Knoll, Gabriele M.: Kulturgeschichte des Reisens. Von der Pilgerfahrt zum Badeurlaub, Darmstadt, 2006; Krempien, Petra: Geschichte des Reisens und des Tourismus. Ein Überblick von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, Limburgerhof, 2000. 112 Ibid., p. 18, footnote 15. Haller first published this poem in 1732 in his collection Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichte. 113 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus: ‘Eine Theorie des Tourismus’, in: Enzensberger, Hans Magnus: Einzelheiten I, Munich, 1962, pp. 147–68. 114 Coxe, William: Travels in Switzerland, 3 vols., London, 1798. 115 Ebel, Johann Gottfried: Anleitung auf die nützlichste und genußvollste Art in der Schweiz zu reisen, Zurich, 1793, 2nd edition 1804/1805, vol. 1, p. 10. Cited in: Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelträume, op. cit., p. 19.

116 Twain, Mark (i.e. Samuel Langhorne Clemens): A Tramp Abroad, 1880, edition Chatto & Windus, London, n.d., p. 163. 117 Ibid., p. 171. 118 Ibid. 119 Daudet, Alphonse: Tartarin sur les Alpes, Paris, 1886. Cited in: Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelträume, op. cit., p. 39. 120 Cf. Meeks, Caroll L. V.: The Railroad Station. An Architectural History, New Haven, 1956; Krings, Ulrich: Deutsche Großstadtbahnhöfe des Historismus, Munich, 1985; Berger, Manfred: Historische Bahnhofsbauten, 4 vols., Berlin and Stuttgart, 1980–96. 121 Cf. Marrey, Bernhard: Les grands magazines des origines à 1939, Paris, 1979. 122 Construction of this project, initiated by Richard D’Oyly Carte, started in 1884. The name Savoy goes back to a palace that Peter, Count of Savoy, ‘who started a tradition of entertainment and hospitality which has endured centuries’, had built around 1248 under Henry III ‘in vico vocato le Straunde’ as ‘fairest manor in Europe’ (MacKenzie, Compton: The Savoy of London, London, Toronto, Wellington, Sydney, 1953, pp. 9–10). 123 The Helmsley Palace, with a foreword by HenryRussell Hitchcock, New York, 1980. 124 Cf. the case study on the Imperial Hotel. 125 Ludy, Robert: Historic Hotels of the World. Past and Present, Philadelphia, 1927 (reprint 2009), p. 16. 126 It was re-established by the Savoyard nobleman St Bernard de Menthon. Most Alpine hospices were run by Augustinians. Ludy, Robert, op. cit., pp. 17–18. 127 Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelpaläste, op. cit.; the same: Hotelträume, op. cit. 128 Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelpaläste, op. cit., pp. 18–19. 129 In 1903, Alexander Emrey bought the Hotel de Cygne and gave the architect Eugène Jost the commission to enlarge it. Jost became generally known as architect of a number of palace hotels, as well as of the Montreux railway station and the Lausanne Post Office. The façade, opening wide to the lake, is remarkable. 130 Fischler, Rita.: ‘Montreux Palace’, in: Schweiz. Suisse.Svizzera.Switzerland. Monatszeitschrift der Schweizerischen Bundesbahn, 3, 1981, p. 44. 131 1900: 3,700; 1910: 5,350 (Rhätisches Museum (Ed.): Bündner Hotellerie um 1900 in Bildern, Chur, 1992, p. 13). 132 Rucki, Isabelle: Das Hotel in den Alpen. Die Geschichte der Oberengadiner Hotelarchitektur von 1860–1914, Zurich, 1989, pp. 192–3; Nicolaus Hartmann sen. (1838–1903), Nicolaus Hartmann junior (1880–1956).

47 Beyond the lobby

133 Parkhotel Kurhaus, 1905; Grand Hotel, 1910; Chantarella and Suvretta House, 1912; Carlton, 1913. 134 La Grande Motte was created as a tourist destination in 1960, with the intention to ‘redirect’ tourist flow away from the Spanish beaches. The hallmarks of the place are its terraced high-rise buildings. Flaine in Haute Savoye is a typical example where a formerly untouched landscape has been covered with housing. The ensemble from the early 1960s, conceived by the former Bauhaus teacher Marcel Breuer, counts nowadays as a listed monument. Les Menuires in the Savoy Alps also came into existence in the 1960s, at an altitude of 1,850 metres, as one of the first resort cities for winter sports mass tourism. 135 Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: Hotelpaläste, op. cit., p. 209. 136 Cited in: Böckli, Peter: ‘Bis zum Tode der Gräfin. Das Drama um den Hotelpalast des Grafen Renesse in Maloja’, Zurich, 1998, in: Flückiger-Seiler, Roland: op. cit., p. 211. 137 Friedrich Nietzsche, cited in: Böckli, Peter, op. cit., p. 98ff. 138 Cf. Schmid, Daniel and Peter Christian Bener: Die Erfindung vom Paradies, Glattbrugg, 1983. Swiss film director Daniel Schmid, who grew up in the Flims Hotel Schweizerhof himself, very arrestingly depicted hotel life from the viewpoint of the hotelier in his 1992 film Hors saison. 139 Today, in Asia, Latin America and Africa, guided visits to slums are offered as part of tourist programmes. As early as 1911–12, in King’s View of New York, we find an advertisement for ‘slumming’, i.e. an organised tour through New York’s slums. Cf. Bollerey, Franziska: ‘The good and the evil city’, in: Ezelsoren, vol. II, no. 3, pp. 22–23. 140 Cf. the case study on the Hotel Il Palazzo. 141 Grafe, Christoph and Franziska Bollerey (Eds.): Cafés and Bars. The Architecture of Public Display, Abingdon, 2008 (2007). 142 Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie, New York, 1900. 143 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 8 April 2011, pp. 39–40. 144 Ibid. 145 ‘The target clientele is a growing market elite. The number of millionaire households rose 14% worldwide in 2009 to include 11.2 million people, according to the Boston Consulting Group and China alone saw a spike of 31%’ (ibid.). 146 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 28 March 2011, p. 44. ‘According to the U.N. World Tourism Organization, the number of Chinese travelling outside the country rose to 4.7 million in 2009, 54% more than in 2005’ (ibid.).

147 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 4 April 2011, p. 40. 148 Baum, Vicky: Grand Hotel, New York, 1931, (German edition Berlin, 1929), pp. 237, 299. 149 Recently, the Palazzo della Gherardesca (fifteenth century), together with an adjacent monastery from the sixteenth century, was converted to a five-star hotel. The Çirag˘an palace (1855–7) in Istanbul has served as another fivestar hotel of the Kempinski group since 1992. These are but two from a multitude of examples.

48 Franziska Bollerey

150 Time Magazine, vol. 176, 1 November 2010, p. 41. 151 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 8 April 2011, p. 53. 152 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 14 March 2011, p. 49. 153 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 4 April 2011, p. 40. 154 Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., p. 24. 155 Ibid., p. 178. 156 Time Magazine, vol. 177, 4 April 2011, p. 40. 157 Hayner, Norman S.: op. cit., p. 182.

2 Learning from Los Angeles Hollywood hotel lobbies Anne Massey

The hotel lobby is a product of Western modernity. The anonymity of the hotel lobby – a space for circulation and display, for booking into a private bedroom, for hiding and being discreet, for lounging and waiting, for personal transformation – is a relatively recent type of architectural space that blurs boundaries between the public and the private. This is an interior form that is packed with potential – an anonymous place, the site of exclusion or inclusion, where public and private are divided, the life of the street and the exclusivity of the luxury hotel are clearly signalled by the hotel lobby (fig. 2.1). But it is a particular public space that is non-domestic and private at the same time. The client is a guest of the hotel and adopts the correct clothing and mannerisms, and is accepted into a private enclave of the foyer, which draws on representations of the home. This belies the historical roots of the hotel in the guest house, a home that was opened up for paying guests. The hotel is now open to anyone who has the financial resources to pay for a drink, a meal, a room or a suite. This gives a rich mix of strangers, but a mix that has been preselected by the revolving door and concierge at the entrance. As Greg Votolato demonstrates in ‘The hotel lobby and local/global journeys’, the hotel lobby is essentially a response to the forces of modernity. Built to cater for a burgeoning clientele of business travellers or holidaymakers, the hotel and Hollywood were American creations and had a far-reaching, global influence. A. K. SandovalStrausz has argued: Hotels, originally intended as elite projects that would exclude most people, gained acceptance in Jacksonian America . . . Hotels . . . formed an egalitarian capitalist answer to monarchical institutions: they might look like aristocratic palaces, yet any white man could walk into one and expect to be served.1

2.1 Hotel Cadillac, Detroit, Michigan, 1895–1915 2.2 The New Willard, Washington, 1904

This vital aspect of the American hotel was part of the prevailing national culture, whereby America perceived itself as an egalitarian nation, based on democratic principles, providing access to all, so long as you were white. Hollywood cinema also reflected this national identity, creating a celebrity culture in place of an aristocratic society of hereditary ruling elites. This was a new, young nation, which saw itself as eschewing the restraints of old-fashioned, European society, with its complex systems of social class and inherited titles of the nobility. This essay considers the emergence of the new architectural form of the hotel lobby in America in relation to the parallel rise in Hollywood film. The lobby as a popular and populated space warrents an analysis that includes its reception and use in popular culture and the experience of the space in everyday lives (fig. 2.2). When Hollywood film first emerged, it was despised and lacked respectability, made by showmen in the LA sunshine, viewed only in penny gaffs or nickelodeons by the lower classes, herded together on wooden benches in village halls and social clubs. With its growing respectability, feature 49 Learning from Los Angeles

films became increasingly complex and invested with technological sophistication, playing to a broader social constituent in spectacular cinemas. Rich with the promise of the chance encounter or the discreet liaison, the hotel lobby has played a star role in many Hollywood film narratives. Hotel lobbies and Hollywood glamour So, the hotel was an American invention, dating back to Victorian times, and Hollywood cinema was an American invention, dating back to the early twentieth century. In that case, why do most of the case studies in this book date from the past fifty years? Before the days when Disney would employ a Council of Architects comprising star American practitioners – Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Stanley Tigerman and Robert Venturi – to design the themed hotels on its new Paris site, hotel design was not a respectable area for high-profile architects. As the British professional monthly for architects, Architectural Review, proclaimed in 1960:

From being an ill-esteemed necessity indicated on master-plans by a block model that no one could be bothered to detail, the hotel has advanced in little more than a decade to the status of a key building in every new capital city, one of the approved settings for films and fashion photography, a hot proposition in real estate, a five-star design subject for fifth year students, or symbol of expanding democracy and distributed wealth, a fit vehicle for the leading architectural talents of the day.2 The history of this building type reflects the history of similar leisure spaces in terms of authorship. For example, ocean-liner interiors were originally fitted out by the shipbuilder, then the anonymous decorating firm, followed by the society decorator or lessknown architect and finishing with professional interior designers and celebrity architects (fig. 2.3).3 In the early history of the hotel lobby, it was Hollywood glamour that provided inspiration for the interior decorator or commercial designer, and the reputable architect was not involved. For example, high-profile American interior decorator Dorothy Draper (1889–1969) redesigned and decorated a plethora of hotel interiors from the 1930s until the 1960s. This included the 1925 Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC, which she refurbished in 1941, and the Palacio Quitandinha in Petropolis in Brazil, 1942–4. The Arrowhead Springs Hotel in San Bernardino, California, was designed by the fashionable Hollywood architects Paul R. Williams (1894–1980) and Gordon B. Kaufmann (1888–1949), and was decorated during 1938–9 by Draper, with a budget of $1 million. This is a typical Draper interior, with grand styling featured in a highly theatrical hotel lobby, designed as a ‘mythical Georgian mansion on an imaginary island in the Caribbean sea’.4 This virtual film set 50 Anne Massey

2.3 Poster of White Sisters, by Henri King, 1924

consisted of a huge, open foyer, with black-lacquered columns contrasting with blond oak walls and folding screens and sumptuous, emerald-green curtains. There was a hint of the original Georgian interior, with niches filled with blue and white china, framed with overscaled, Chinese fretwork. The theatricality of the space was extended into discrete sitting areas, furnished with plush seating in chunky beige chenille and cosy rugs, which were placed in front of black and white, overblown classical fireplaces. The occasional tables were shiny and black, with enlarged swags, on which were placed blue and white, oriental-style lamp stands with white shades. This was, of course, a loose interpretation of the Georgian, as created by the decorator Draper for the hotel’s stylish clientele, many of whom spent most of their lives on a film set. It was a magnet for Hollywood stars – the grand opening on 16 December 1939 was broadcast nationally on the radio, hosted by the singer Rudy Vallee and featuring Judy Garland singing ‘Comes Love’. The celebrity fame of the hotel continued, and Elizabeth Taylor spent her honeymoon there with her first husband, Nicky Hilton. Stars from the Hollywood galaxy, including Humphrey Bogart, Lucille Ball and Clark Gable, all passed through this fantasy lobby. Draper herself was a film fan, and confessed to Alice Faye, the actress: ‘Motion pictures . . . have taught us much in scale and value of the dramatic’.5 Later designers who came to realise that the design of the hotel lobby could be learned from the similarly disreputable area of Hollywood film include Morris Lapidus. Lapidus had a background in retail design and advertising. This architect of post-war, glitzy hotels in Miami commented: Suppose a director came to me with a script that called for a fabulous, luxurious tropical hotel setting. ‘Give it to me. Knock 51 Learning from Los Angeles

their eyes out with it. It has got to be fabulous.’ I’d say, ‘All right, I’ll design a fabulous movie set.’ And that’s what I did.6

2.4 Lobby of Fontainebleau Hotel, Morris Lapidus, 1954 2.5 Stairs in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel, Morris Lapidus, 1954

As Alice Friedman has argued, Lapidus was persistently criticised for his crowd-pleasing tactics when designing the eight hotels he created from 1949 until 1956 at the Miami Beach Resort.7 These included the Fontainebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc (1955), situated beside each other, facing the ocean. Both had spectacular lobbies: the Fontainebleau, built at a cost of $13 million, was crescent shaped and drew on the inspiration of a glamorised modernism (fig. 2.4). The lobby featured a photomural of a Piraneisian scene and sweeping staircase to the small mezzanine above, where guests could check in their coats before making a dramatic descent on the curved staircase to the lobby below, against the antique ruins of the Piraneisi scene. The vast lobby, punctuated by grandiose, illuminated pillars; enormous chandeliers designed by Lapidus and carpeted islands with circular sofas, easy chairs and statues (fig. 2.5). The 1,400 guests at the Hotel Fontainebleau lapped up the French, old-world charm mixed with midcentury modern. Most were holidaying at Miami Beach, but there was a sprinkling of Hollywood glamour. J. Edgar Hoover, when trying to link singer Frank Sinatra with the Mafia during FBI investigations, claimed Sinatra had met Al Capone’s cousin, Joe Fishcetti, at the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami. Sinatra hosted a television show from the ballroom there in 1960, sponsored by Timex and broadcast by ABC. The most famous show was the homecoming of Elvis Presley, in March 1960, from his two years in the army. Other celebrity guests to stay at the hotel included Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jnr, Lucille Ball, Jerry Lewis, Marlene Dietrich and Debbie Reynolds. The hotel was also used as a location for film shoots, including Bellboy in 1960, starring Jerry Lewis as an employee of the Fontainebleau Hotel. The James Bond film, Goldfinger, of 1964, included some location shots of the Fontainebleau, but Sean Connery never travelled to Miami, and parts of the hotel were mocked up at Pinewood Studios in England. The opening shot features an aerial shot of Miami Beach, prominently featuring the distinctive crescent shape of the hotel. The camera then zooms in to the pool area, populated by bikini-clad women at play. Sean Connery then appears poolside in swimming trunks, but the backdrop is obviously a projection. The Fontainebleau was the last word in glamour, from its opening until the hotel went bankrupt in 1977. The hotel reopened in 2008, when it was also added to the US National Register of Historic Places. Hotel lobbies on Hollywood film The hotel lobby has played a pivotal role in many Hollywood films as the perfect setting for encounters between strangers, a narrative device for character and plot development. However, upon closer examination, certain underlying anxieties about anonymous modernity, gender and social inclusion are played out. The sets of 52 Anne Massey

2.6 Front desk of Grand Hotel, Edmund Goulding, 1932

early films were essentially based on the conventions of theatre design, with flat, painted backdrops adorning the soundstage. The D. W. Griffiths film, Love in an Apartment Hotel (1913), starring Blanche Sweet, lasted only 17 minutes and was played out in black and white against two-dimensional sets that were probably three-walled box sets erected on the lots in Hollywood. As James Hood Macfarland commented in 1920: ‘there were rooms made of canvas and painted, rooms which shook and swayed and threatened to fall as the characters opened and closed the doors.’8 With the introduction of more sophisticated technology, including panchromatic film stock and improved depth-of-field photography, the filmic image became sharper, with a heightened sense of threedimensionality. Everything that appeared in shot was in focus, and, therefore, there needed to be a greater attention to detail in set design. These technological innovations combined with a thirst for going to the cinema among the general public and an economy linked with mass consumption. America asserted itself as the global tastemaker and provider of popular entertainment on a mass scale. This new success resulted in a far more polished end product, which, from the 1930s, also included sound. But Hollywood still used built sets rather than locations for the majority of its shoots. An early sound film, Grand Hotel (1932), used an extravagant hotel lobby as its principal set (fig. 2.6). Art Director for MGM, Cedric Gibbons, managed the design of the set, assisted by Edwin B. Willis and Russian émigré Alexander Toluboff. The film was set in a luxury hotel in Berlin, but the set was built in Los Angeles. Gibbons had drawn inspiration from his encounter with art deco at the 1925 Exposition des Art Decoratifs et Industrieles Modernes. Starting his career as a theatreset designer, he was one of the prime movers in creating sets for films as effective, but as diverse, as Marie Antoinette and The Wizard of Oz. For Grand Hotel, the fictional space was tightly controlled, as tightly controlled as bodies in a revolving door, which is the focus of the opening shot of the film. Establishing this threshold, the revolving door acts as an important marker of inside and outside. First patented in Berlin in 1881 by H. Bockhacker, the revolving door was used from the late nineteenth century onwards in commercial buildings, predominately hotel lobbies and department stores. The revolving door regiments the body, taking it from the street into the hotel interior. It functions as a device for restricting the flow of cold air into the foyer, thus saving the staff inside from contracting cold and flu viruses: it was open at the same time as it was closed.9 But the revolving door also operates as a social segregator, allowing hotel staff to observe who comes in through the transparent, turning door. In Grand Hotel, the revolving door is constructed from metal and glass, enabling full visibility of the users; it is also brightly lit and opens directly before the central desk in the middle of the foyer. The design of the entrance lobby is visually stunning, with a shiny, black and white chequered floor that is arranged around the central desk in concentric 53 Learning from Los Angeles

2.7 Poster for Weekend at the Waldorf, 1945

zones, in art deco style. The desk is circular, banded by metal strips that are echoed in the window mullions. The lobby is situated on the ground-floor and surrounded by a circular atrium. A bird’s-eye shot at the beginning of the film establishes the front desk as the focal point of the film. A stream of guests emerges from the revolving door towards the desk, to be roomed and offered hospitality. The lobby as a space for an intermingling crowd, which could contain suspect strangers, is reflected in the film, which follows the narrative of a murder mystery. The characters are drawn from differing social backgrounds and brought together by means of the interior architecture of the Grand Hotel lobby, like pawns on a chessboard. The apparently aristocratic Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore) is actually a jewel thief, and he encounters the socially humble but sexually confident Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford), who is working as a stenographer, in the lobby. Their paths also cross with the terminally ill Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), who is blowing his life’s savings at the luxury hotel, unknown to the other guests. This mixture of gender, social class and personal situation acts as a microcosm for the anxieties generated by life during the rise of modernity and, in this case, at the beginning of the Great Depression. The film was deliberately set in Berlin to showcase the acting talents and husky voice of Greta Garbo. There was a follow up to the classic Grand Hotel, Weekend at the Waldorf, in 1945, which showcased the glamour of New York’s art deco Waldorf Astoria, which had opened on New York’s Park Avenue in 1931 (fig. 2.7). Starring Ginger Rogers, the film included some exterior and interior shots of the actual hotel, but the lobby scenes were shot on a specially built lot at MGM’s studios in Los Angeles. This was a device used again in Some Like It Hot, 1959, which featured exterior shots of the later nineteenth-century, San Diego-based Hotel del Coronado, masquerading as a Miami-based beach venue. The interiors are sparse and obviously a studio set, with vaccuous white walls and no sense of space. The 1967 film The Graduate is one of the first to be filmed partly on location in a hotel lobby, in this case the renowned Ambassador Hotel at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, the main street between Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles. Built in 1921 and designed by Myron Hunt (1868–1952) in Spanish colonial style, with grandiose Renaissance fireplaces and tiled floors, the Ambassador Hotel was the venue of the famous Coconut Grove lounge, festooned with palm trees left over from Rudolph Valentino’s film The Sheik and location for the Oscar ceremonies throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Hunt had trained in architecture at the Massachusetts School of Technology (now MIT) in Boston, before leaving for a two-year tour of Europe with his new wife in 1893. The couple moved to Pasadena, California, in 1903, owing to his wife’s tuberculosis, and he set up his own practice there in 1908. He was responsible for the design of many private residences and prominent public buildings, including the Huntingdon Library, the Rose Bowl and the Pasadena Public Library. Now all but lost to the 54 Anne Massey

2.8 Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols, 1967

history of architecture, Myron Hunt was architect of many important features of the new Southern California. The Ambassador Hotel was subsequently modernised by architect Paul Williams (1894–1980) and used as the set for The Graduate (1967), where Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hofmann) arranges his illicit tryst with Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) at what is referred to as the Taft Hotel in the film. Before even entering the lobby, Braddock opens the door to allow a troop of middle-aged, respectable citizens to file out past him, before awkwardly entering the space himself. Embarrassed and lost, he lacks the experience of the seasoned lover and he hides behind the huge hotel lobby desk. Surveyed by the receptionist, he makes his way to the wrong function room, before sitting in the bar to await Mrs Robinson. She arrives, composed and experienced, taking command of the situation. He doesn’t know how to order a drink, but she snaps ‘Martini’ to the waiter. Hofmann books a room, but then telephones Anne Bancroft to tell her, rather than re-enter the bar. He simply doesn’t have the experience, age and aplomb to deal with the situation, and this is accentuated by the overbearing reception desk. Visually, the hotel desk obscures Hoffman at times and appears omnipresent, surveying all guests and triggering Hoffman’s paranoia. But he is rescued by the sophistication of Mrs Robinson. The interior of the Ambassador is an elegant mix of grandiose modernism and spacious grandeur, and it was used for a whole series of films, including The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) and The Mask (1994), until its controversial demolition in 2005 so that a school could be built.10 Closed as an operating hotel in 1988, it was owned by Donald Trump and provided a more economical alternative to hiring a Hollywood sound stage for both TV and film productions. The Ambassador Hotel was also used for scenes for the filming of Pretty Woman, released in 1990, including the scene where Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) is taught how to navigate the cutlery at a dinner table by manager, Barnard Thompson (Hector Elizondo). The pivotal lobby scenes were also shot at the Ambassador Hotel, which is a site for negotiation and socialisation. The dialogue of the film relates to the Italianate 1928 Regent Beverly Wilshire, which is filmed from the exterior. Designed by Albert Raymond Walker (1881–1958) and Percy Augustus Eisen (1885–1946) in Italianate style, it was originally an apartment hotel and part of the early growth of Beverly Hills and, like the Ambassador Hotel, is also situated on Wilshire Boulevard at number 9500, as the home and playground of the Hollywood elite. Unlike the Ambassador Hotel, it is now listed as of Local Significance on the National Register of Historic Places, so should escape demolition. Walker and Eisen were responsible for many of the theatres, hotels and office buildings in and around Los Angeles during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Four Star Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard in 1932. Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) and Vivian Ward end up outside the Regent Beverly Wilshire, where he is staying, after she drives his 55 Learning from Los Angeles

2.9 Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, in Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall, 1990

lawyer’s borrowed silver Lotus Esprit there. As Reyner Banham observed in 1971, ‘Wilshire Boulevard is one of the few great streets in the world where driving is a pleasure.’11 Edward has problems, as he is usually driven by a chauffeur, and can’t operate the gear stick. Vivian takes over the driving, as the streetwise girl who grew up with bad-boy petrol heads. The negotiations continue at the threshold of the hotel. He puts his coat around her shoulders, telling her, ‘This hotel is not the type of establishment that rents rooms by the hour’, referring to Vivian’s lowly status as a streetwalker. He commands the social standing to rent the elite penthouse suite, and she has the personality to win his heart. The penthouse suite was a set, built on the nearby Disney lot. The couple enter the hotel lobby, with its intimidating chandeliers, marble floors, polished wood, engraved mirrors and staring guests. ‘Holy shit’, remarks Vivian. Despite the cheesy Pygmalion narrative, the film is useful for analysing the role of the foyer, as the space is used as a device for the negotiation of different social strata. Confusing and challenging, the traffic of human beings through the entrance lobby needs controlling and policing to ensure acceptance into the social milieu of the luxury hotel. The couple are then swept up into the exclusive elevator, where Vivian challenges the fellow hotel guests with her display of long legs. The following day, Edward gives Vivian cash to buy smart outfits to fit into the higher social strata he is moving in, and she calls her friend, Kit de Luca, for advice where to shop. She responds, ‘Rodeo Drive’. Vivian heads there, as it is only round the corner from the hotel, and enters one of the high-end boutiques. After her enquiry about an outfit, the hostile attendants respond: ‘You’re obviously in the wrong place. Please leave.’ Sloping back into the foyer of the Ambassador Hotel dejected, Vivian is called into the office of the manager, Barny Thompson. He persuades Vivian to masquerade as Edward’s niece to avoid marring the reputation of the hotel. He then fixes up a visit to a nearby department store to buy a little black dress, and her socialisation begins. The manager catches Edward in the lobby on his return from work and instructs him to refer to Vivian as his ‘niece’ and not the call girl she is. A further shopping trip ensues the following day. The crowning moment comes when Vivian dresses in an all red evening dress, with a beautiful necklace hired by Edward, for a trip to the opera. She strides into the lobby as if she owned it, tall, confident and glamorous, in control of her immediate space by being one of the crowd, not alternative to the crowd (fig. 2.9). This feeling of the exclusion of the streetwalker is reinforced when Vivian’s friend and fellow hooker, Kit de Luca, visits the hotel. She is stopped dead in the hotel lobby, at the desk, by a disapproving receptionist who contacts Vivian. They have refreshments, not in the lobby, but outside by the pool in an uncomfortable encounter. Vivian finally departs, seen in the lobby resplendent and respectable in coral suit and white shirt, destined to return to college and leave the streets. 56 Anne Massey

It is also in the lobby that Edward has a life changing moment. The manager examines the necklace Edward has hired and says: ‘Its difficult to let something so beautiful go’. Edward then comes to his senses and pursues Vivian to her cheap rental room on Sunset Boulevard to the soundtrack of opera, to rescue her, and she rescues him right back. Beyond the hotel foyer, the liaison can reach completion, but it is the successful socialisation of Vivian in that most instrumental of interior spaces, the hotel lobby, that facilitates their union. Learning from Los Angeles The hotel lobby on film acts as a narrative device to bring together and socialise the actors on screen. The hotel lobby as an interior space to be experienced guarantees the hotel guest a certain cachet, a feeling of glamour when entering the revolving door. But this special space has been relatively overlooked by architectural theory. Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour observed in Learning From Las Vegas that architects had ignored the contemporary, urban popular culture that surrounds them, and attempted to replace it with a grander vision of how things should be. ‘Modern architecture has not so much excluded the commercial vernacular as it has tried to take it over by inventing and enforcing a vernacular of its own, improved and universal.’12 But this seminal work of postmodern architectural theory takes little account of the interiors of buildings; its focus is the freeway and the urban environment created by billboards. The hotel lobby is essentially an internal space, and so has escaped serious architectural attention until recently. The films of Los Angeles and Hollywood, in the form of fantasy and escape, grand gestures and luxury environments, contain lessons that designers today can learn from. The fantasy world created at Miami Beach by Morris Lapidus and the overblown Georgian creations of Dorothy Draper in California would not be possible without the imagined spaces created by Hollywood cinema. Whether acting as an actual location, as a fictionalised place or a studio recreation, the hotel lobby is a supreme fantasy space, which has yet to be fully exploited. As the British art critic and member of the Independent Group, Lawrence Alloway, argued in 1959 following his first visit to Los Angeles:

Architecture has its own popular art, without incorporating (and, of course, ‘improving’ in the process) the complex, untidy, fantastic, quick-paced environment . . . Popular art in the city is a function of the whole city and not only of its architects. If the architect learns more about subjective and ‘illogical’ human values from the study of popular art, then architecture will have gained, and so will future users; but to adopt playful and odd forms, without their spirit, without their precise functions, will make a solemn travesty of the environment in which pop art naturally thrives.13

57 Learning from Los Angeles

2.10 Lobby of Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, 2010

2.11 Dorothy Draper, interior decorator, 1942

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History, Yale University Press, London, 2007, p. 72. Architectural Review, ‘Hotels: from grand to fabulous’, September 1960, p. 241. Anne Wealleans, Designing Liners: A History of Interior Design Afloat, Routledge, London, 2006. Dorothy Draper, as quoted in Mitchell Owens, ‘Living large: the brash, bodacious hotels of Dorothy Draper’, in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 2005, Issue 25: 275. Ibid. Morris Lapidus, as quoted in Carol Berens, Hotel Bars and Lobbies, McGraw Hill, New York, 1997, p. 1. Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010, pp. 149–85.

58 Anne Massey

8

9

10 11

12

13

James Hood Macfarland, ‘Architectural problems in motion picture production’, The American Architect, 21 July 1920, p. 66. Laurent Stadler, ‘Turning architecture inside out: revolving doors and other threshold devices’, Journal of Design History, 2009, 22(1): 69–77. J. T. Long, ‘L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel’, Architectural Record, September 2005: 36. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Allen Lane, London, 1971, p. 87. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, MIT Press, Cambridge, and London, 1972, p. 6. Lawrence Alloway, ‘City notes’, Architectural Design, January 1959: 35.

3 The architectonics of the hotel lobby The norms and forms of a public–private figure Tom Avermaete

The hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one. It is the setting for those who neither seek nor find the one who is always sought, and who are therefore guests in space as such – a space that encompasses them and has no function other than to encompass them.1 This intriguing description of the architectural space of the hotel lobby is part of an essay that Siegfried Kracauer, German culture and film critic, wrote in the middle of the 1920s. In the manner of his teacher Georg Simmel and his well-known contemporary Walter Benjamin, Kracauer mapped quotidian spaces and analysed them as parts of a wider cultural landscape of modernity.2 The hotel lobby was, for him, one of the spaces that epitomized the cultural transformation of the modern city, recognizable in cities such as Berlin and New York. Kracauer describes the lobby as an exemplary modern space, where people found themselves vis-à-vis de rien. This lack of connection is, in his view, representative of the ‘mere gap’ into which the modern individual finds himself falling. Kracauer depicts in his essay the unrelatedness of the subject to the lobby space, as well as the absence of a connection between the users of the lobby. Paradoxically, he argues that this also creates a sense of familiarity. The knowledge that someone has occupied the space before you, and has had experiences there other than yours, leaves in the lobby a sense of history that is both more powerful but also more alienating than a strong sense of familial history that you would find in a home. This abstract sense of strangers’ pasts that fills the space adds to the powerful disconnection felt within the hotel, Kracauer argues.

3.1 View of revolving door

The revolving door: turning public space inside/out Kracauer’s 1920s descriptions of modern places of transience and permanence, of uncanniness and familiarity, were no imaginary constructs but anchored in the experience of real hotel lobby spaces – articulated by architects and interior designers and composed of a variety of distinct architectural elements. A first important architectural element of the modern hotel lobby is the door, which articulates the transition between inside and outside public space and acts as a threshold. Its most renowned typology is the ‘revolving door’, patented in 1888 by the firm of Theophilus Van Kannel in Philadelphia.3 In the patent drawing it was described as having ‘three radiating and equidistant wings . . . provided with weather-strips or equivalent means to insure a snug fit’. The door ‘possesses numerous advantages over a hinged-door structure . . . it is perfectly noiseless . . . effectually prevents the entrance of wind, snow, rain or dust’4 (figs. 3.2 and 3.3). As the English architectural critic Reyner Banham points out, in his book Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), the revolving door was initially developed for high-rise buildings, as regular doors are hard to open because of the vacuum caused by air flowing 59 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

3.2 Patented drawings of revolving door by Storm factory 3.3 Patented drawings of revolving door by Storm factory

60 Tom Avermaete

upwards through stairwells, elevator shafts and chimneys.5 Van Kannel’s new type of door opened up a whole set of advantages, as Banham explains: The van Kannel Company’s slogan ‘Always Closed’, (a person passing through the door pushes any one of its wings forward, the wing behind him arriving at the curved side of the wall before the wing in front leaves it.), explains well enough why their catalogue could claim better ventilation control and greater uniformity of temperature within the building as a consequence of their revolving door. It was an effective environmental filter that admitted persons but not the wind.6 This particular set of environmental characteristics also offered great advantages for hotel lobbies, which aimed to combine the character of transition spaces between street and hotel room with a place for staying. Hence, from the beginning of the twentieth century, the revolving door would become a common feature of hotel architecture in such diverse cities as Paris, Berlin, London and New York. However, it not only played the role of a climatologic filter for the hotel lobby, but also came to represent one of the hotel’s basic organizational principles: a flow of in- and outgoing guests. The very architecture of the revolving door came to symbolize that the characters in the hotel lobby can and will be replaced by new guests as soon as the old ones are gone, according to the rhythm of the turning panels. The revolving door defined a new sort of limit between inside and outside public space. The semantic novelty of the revolving door can be illuminated through the frame proposed in 1909 by Georg Simmel, in his essay ‘Bridge and Door’.7 Simmel argues that the distinction between the bridge and the door, as architectural entities, lies in their relationship to natural space, or the manner in which each acts to ‘separate the connected or connect the separate’.8 In his view, the bridge operates as a demonstration of the way humanity conceives of the separateness encountered in natural boundaries (such as opposite banks of a river), and the way in which this separateness is potentially connectable.9 The door offers another configuration altogether, whereby ‘the door forms, as it were, a linkage between the space of human beings and everything that remains outside it’.10 The door, in this sense, acts as a finite boundary between the enclosed space of human design and that of nature.11 In modern times, Simmel believed, the function of the door is to demarcate experience and social status through its operation, defining everything relatively as exterior to, or within, the architectural space. However, this is not necessarily a limiting function: the boundary of the door can be read as a form of freedom, in that, as a boundary, it can be removed at any time by opening of the door.12 Simmel underlines that bridge and door differ radically in their modes of operation: ‘it makes no difference in meaning in which direction one 61 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

crosses a bridge, whereas the door displays a complete difference of intention between entering and exiting’.13 The revolving hotel door combines the two figures. It consists of huge planes of clear glass, creating the illusion of an exterior disappearing into the interior, and an interior expanding out into an exterior, all in perpetual movement vis-à-vis a well-travelled bridge. It is neither a door nor a bridge, yet it operates as both. In its action as a revolving door, it momentarily captures interior and exterior space and connects the two, only, in the next instance, to cut each space off from the other. The limit of the revolving door is no longer gradual or abrupt, but rather invisible and detached. Once inside the swing door, the individual remains detached from the space, and the interior becomes as alienating as the exterior. The revolving door also functions as a bridge in that, regardless of the direction of travel, one is bound to pass someone travelling in the opposite direction. It offers the possibility to enter the lobby momentarily, just look around and disappear again. The revolving door turns public space inside out. The lobby hall: locus of an anonymous congregation A second, central architectural element of the hotel lobby is the main hall, eloquently described by Kracauer in his 1920s article. As a central space in the hotel, the lobby hall is the main gathering space and therefore site of sociability. It is the room that welcomes and entices, but also limits experience, as it is devoid of personality; it can be sterile and imposing. In Kracauer’s view, the lobby hall is a place where ‘remnants of individuals slip into the nirvana of relaxation, faces disappear behind newspapers, and the artificial continuous light illuminates nothing but mannequins’.14 Indeed, though the hotel lobby is a conduit and takes on its meanings in relation to the areas that it links, it is also a place that some people do not pass through. Instead, it becomes a rest point in the busyness of the metropolis, as the Austrian writer Joseph Roth describes strikingly in his 1930 publication Panoptikum:

Here in the lobby, I remain seated. It is home and the world, foreign and nearby, my unsuspecting gallery! Here I start to write about my friends, the hotel staff. They are noisy personalities! World citizens! Humanists! Linguists, Psychologists! No cosmopolitans compared to them. They are the true cosmopolitans.15 Before the nineteenth century, only luxury hotels had lobby halls large enough to be statement-producing gathering places. It is only in the nineteenth-century grand hotels that larger lobby halls appeared that were modelled after the main halls of their admitted precedents: the palaces and castles of the aristocracy. After the Second World War, a new set of important transformations would take place, as more and more travellers took to the roads and – later – to the air. 62 Tom Avermaete

3.4 Lobby of Palace Hotel, Chicago, with carriages, 1895

Beginning in the United States, the rapid development of mass tourism gave rise to a genuine boom in hotel construction. Working in close alliance, the big travel and transport companies (especially air companies) began establishing high-quality hotel chains around the world: Sheraton, Hyatt, Hilton, Mariott, Intercontinental . . . These hotels had several things in common, one of them being an increased architectural interest of the lobby hall. Reyner Banham was one of the first to appreciate the significance of these new, post-war lobby halls in his 1979 article on the massive hotel atria designed by John Portman.16 He argued that they were inspired by the 1935 H. G. Wells movie Things to Come: Until you get to the Hyatt superhotels, and especially those designed by John Portman, for they recreate in all-too-concrete fact the kind of gigantic interior space that most of us recall as the image of the latter sequences of Things to Come. The giant space in question is the central piazza of Wells’ (Korda’s?) city of the future, rising umpteen storeys high to a glazed roof – ditto 63 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

3.5 (facing page) Front desk of Grand Hotel, Edmund Goulding, 1932

John Portman’s hotels. The huge space is ringed by pedestrian galleries and traversed by flying walkways – ditto (within limits) Portman’s hotels. Vertical transportation in the Korda Piazza is by visible elevators in transparent ducts – and that kind of transportation has been the very trademark of Portman ever since the Peachtree Center in Atlanta over a decade ago. [. . .] The clincher, however – and a very unsettling one for me – is the trees. [. . .] Portman’s trees don’t come in rows, but in large oval or circular concrete planters, bracketing off the visible structure high up above your head when you enter at foyer level.17 However, Banham did not reduce the Portman hotel lobbies to their filmic precedents. He also points to their innovative capacity to create interior worlds: A great Portman hotel is just that – Renaissance Center in Detroit is almost a complete city in itself, inward-turned and virtually sealed against the legendary squalor and violence of downtown Detroit. Indeed, it has what look like defensive outworks, between its entrance areas and the city beyond. It’s all uncomfortably like one of those self-contained cities planted on the face of an alien planet that were so common in SF. With his description, Banham captured perfectly how the architectural element of the lobby hall had evolved from a room that made public space enter the hotel to a secluded interior that aimed to install a sense of the public sphere within its confines. The reception desk: site de passage The reception or front desk is another particular architectural element that contributes to the architectural assemblage of the hotel lobby. It is, in the first place, a counter where guests are received, but it is also the site where a ‘rite de passage’ is performed, which turns the anonymous visitor of the hotel lobby into a full-fledged hotel guest. It is the locus where the guest is officially welcomed and inscribed in the register as a ‘hotel guest’. Once the registration process has been completed, the receptionist assigns a room and hands over the key. But the reception desk is also the site where the hotel will be officially left, where the necessary financial transactions will take place, and where the guest is officially seen off. This entire rite de passage is accompanied by a particular ‘checking-in’ and ‘checking-out’ discourse. During the stay, the reception desk plays the role of information counter, which coordinates folders, telegrams, letters and messages. In smaller nineteenth-century hotels, the reception desk very often took the figure of a simple table that allowed the reception clerk and the novice-guest to perform the necessary actions, such as ringing the bell, inscribing in the guest book and handing over the room keys. 64 Tom Avermaete

65 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

In modern hotels, the reception desk increasingly receives the features of a bar or counter, reminiscent of similar reception elements in other service places such as public offices, banks, hospitals, airports or railway stations. Simultaneously, the reception desk also becomes the focus of architectural intervention. The architecture of the modern reception desk is the result of several defining factors. Manuals of hotel design define the length of the reception desk in direct relation to the amount of guest-rooms: ‘4.5 meters for 100–150 rooms, 7.5 meters for 200–250 rooms and 10.5 meters for 300–400 rooms’.18 The reception desk is always related to a front office that provides the backup for the different functions that the reception desk fulfills: registration, payment, mail delivery, key disposal and storage. The architecture of the reception desk provides for these different activities. It has a counter-top that is suitable for writing and displaying brochures and accommodates the typical hotel bell that allows for calling the receptionist or bell-boy. The desk has also a handbag shelf that allows the traveller to dispose of some of his/her small luggage. Behind the desk are, typically, key rails and letterboxes. Above all, the reception desk functions as a unit that controls the ‘passage’ between the public space of the lobby and the semi-private spaces of the upstairs. The reception desk is a barrier or control post along the hotel entrances and circulation ways: ‘The front desk . . . served as a kind of policing unit under legal obligation to check for unregistered aliens, and under a self-imposed moral and aesthetic imperative to bar access to indigents and undesirables.’19 Indeed, in a variety of literature on hotels, the reception desk is depicted as a ‘site de passage’. The entire plot of Stephen Schneck’s 1965 novel The Nightclerk is posited upon the ritual of passing the reception desk and accessing the mystic and even dangerous private realm of the ‘upstairs’: ‘The pseudonyms and transient tribes of Smith, Jones, Johns, Brown, White and Gray have left veracity no room on the page. Reality has been crowded off the register. Names are regularly changed to protect the guilty.’20 In Edmund Goulding’s movie Grand Hotel (1932), the reception desk gets a circular form and is positioned at the very centre. Around the desk, Cedric Gibbons designed a bold pattern of alternating black and white squares that resolve into increasingly extended diamonds as the pattern turns into a vortex, with the desk as its centre. Circular movement around the hub of the desk is the guiding structural principle of the film. This principle literalizes the desk’s allegorical standing as the centre around which the characters’ lives revolve and from which it is controlled. The film’s metaphor of the gigantic urban hotel as a microcosm of life relies on this central point of reference and reproduces the central control point of Bentham’s panopticon.

66 Tom Avermaete

3.6 Staircase in the Spalding Hotel, Duluth, 1930

Stairs and elevators: stages of collective performance Like the revolving door, stairs play an important role that reaches far beyond being a vehicle to get hotel guests from one place to another, or to mediate the semi-public character of the lobby to the intimacy of the rooms. The most impressive examples of modern hotel stairs are modelled after their peers in opera and theatre buildings: they serve a functional purpose, but above all are representative spaces where public life can be performed. As Bettina Mathias explains it, the ‘grand staircase’ funnels social movement:

The dark red carpet that covers the bright marble of the steps accentuates the gilded art-deco grid supporting the handrails on both sides. [. . .] The concave shape of the rails on both sides of the steps reminds you of a funnel. A funnel for social movement. It is an open invitation to walk down. Guests come from the left and from the right of the gallery. 21 Matthias depicts how the social movement on the stairs interacts with the practices in the lobby hall: As people look up from their magazines and drinks in the lobby, they can not but notice the spectacle on the staircase, midway between the exclusive upstairs gallery and their own sphere, the public-access area of the lobby, a guest in sight, yet still not there with them. Where the staircase meets the lobby, some will go left, some right, merging with the crowd.22 The hotel stair is a space of collective performance, but not a communal or parochial space, as the Austrian writer Franz Werfel 67 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

reminds us in his well-known essay ‘Die Hoteltreppe’ (1921). Werfel describes the young Francine, daughter of a former Imperial Habsburger minister, as she walks up the five flights of her northern Italian hotel’s staircase. Francine is tortured by the thought that she became pregnant by a one-night stand. After having climbed the stairs as a sort of self-imposed and religiously tinged punishment for her sexual escapade, she realizes that what awaits her at the end of this symbolic ascent is not happiness and blissful comfort, but ‘a great desolation, rushing in the ears like mocking water’.23 Francine lets the dangerous magnetism of the void in the centre of the staircase seduce her and she dives into the abyss. Werfel’s narrator asks: ‘Why did no guest come out of his door? Why did nobody pass? Why, in all the broad corridors of the hotel did no human footsteps take pity on her?’24 The answers to these questions resonate silently through the text: because the hotel stair is populated by guests, not by a community of sympathetic human beings who support each other morally and emotionally. The Austrian writer Joseph Roth stressed the same anonymity in his work on the Hotel Savoy in Lodz, Poland: I walk slowly downstairs. From the lower floors come voices, but up here everything is silent. All the doors are shut, one moves as if it were an old monastery, past the doors of monks at prayer. The fifth floor looks exactly like the sixth, one could easily confuse them. [. . .] Upon the flagstones of the third floor lie dark red carpets with green borders and one no longer hears one’s footsteps. The room numbers are not painted on the doors but mounted on little porcelain signs. A maid passes with a feather duster and a wastepaper basket. They seem here to pay more attention to cleanliness. This is where the rich live, and the cunning Kaleguropulos lets the clocks run slow, because the rich have time.25 As Roth points out, most hotel bedchambers were located on upper storeys, and carrying bags or trunks up flights of stairs – both individually and with the help of bell-boys – would not only be an important activity, but also a sheer element of class distinction. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, cheaper rooms would often be on the higher floors, whereas the more luxurious ones were closer to the lobby space. This would change with the introduction of elevators. As Sigfried Giedion has pointed out, in 1859 Otis Tufts patented his so-called Vertical Screw Railway and saw its first installations in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City and in the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia.26 Only at the beginning of the twentieth century were elevators becoming a more common amenity in hotel construction.27 By the 1930s, modern lifts were an everyday feature, as literature of the period illustrates. Arnold Bennett’s second hotel novel, Imperial Palace, published in 1928, begins with: ‘Evelyn came down by the lift 68 Tom Avermaete

3.7 Lift in the Spalding Hotel, Duluth, 1930

into the great front-hall’,28 and in Roth’s Hotel Savoy in Lodz, Poland, the elevator also plays a paramount role: I sway and find myself thinking that I could enjoy this upward motion for quite a long time. I enjoy the swaying feeling and calculate how many wearisome steps I would have had to climb but for this noble lift. As I rise ever higher, I throw my bitterness, my wanderings and homelessness, all my mendicant past, down the liftshaft from which it can never reach me again.29 Elevators would also become the focus of design activity. Hotel plans were arranged, particularly to increase circulation and to improve flow of both people and services, from the lobby through the lounges to the dining area, while also maximizing ease of transport to other areas of the hotel through the careful placements of lifts that would take inhabitants to the private bedroom spaces: ‘The passenger-elevator installation should be conveniently located, adequate to handle the maximum demands of a fully occupied hotel.’30 John Portman started 69 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

to dramatize the elevator in his hotel designs, as he explained concerning the Atlanta Regency Hyatt Hotel: The whole idea was to open everything up; take the hotel from its closed, tight position and explode it; take the elevators and literally pull them out of the walls and let them become an experience within themselves, let them become a giant kinetic sculpture.31 The architectonics of the hotel lobby The assemblage of revolving doors, halls, reception desks, stairs and elevators results in the architectonics of the modern hotel lobby. As Kracauer already noticed, these architectonics are the expression of changing ideas about travel and its social functions, of different technical developments and typological transformations, but above all they introduce a new definition of the public sphere. Not as abstract theoretical construct, but rather through concrete material articulation of elements and spaces does the hotel lobby define the contours of a different public realm. This new definition was initially a reaction to the deterioration of the strict barriers between public and private, important markers of bourgeois identity in the nineteenth century, under the effects of increasing transnational industrialization and commerce, as well as of the development of modern urban centres. The hotel lobby presents a stage to a new, modern individual who starts to disappear in the ‘mass’ and is allowed a new, ambivalent attitude towards life. The architectonics of the hotel lobby offer him a new grey zone to experiment with this posture. They offer a locus that is neither home nor foreign land, where the guest is neither alone nor part of a group, neither private nor public, but rather within the ambiguity and complexity of a modern public sphere. Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Kracauer, S.: The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, trans., edited and with introduction by Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 175. Huyssen, A.: ‘Modernist miniatures: literary snapshots of urban spaces’, Yeager, Patricia (Ed.): PMLA, Cities Special Issue, 122, 2007: 27–42. On this issue, see, among others: Hoffmann, Gretl: Doors: Excellence in International Design, London: George Godwin; New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977; and Clery, Val: Doors, New York: Viking, 1978. Op. cit. Beardmore, A.: The Revolving Door since 1881: Architecture in Detail, Edam: Boon, 2000, p. 11. Banham, R.: The Architecture of the WellTempered Environment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 73–4.

70 Tom Avermaete

6

7

8

9

10

Banham, R.: The Architecture of the WellTempered Environment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 74. Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), in: Leach, N. (Ed.): Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 66–9. Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), in Simmel on Culture, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, Eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, pp. 170–4. Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), Simmel on Culture, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, Eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, p. 171. Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), Simmel on Culture, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, Eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, p. 174.

11

12

13

14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21

22

Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), Simmel on Culture, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, Eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, p. 172. Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), Simmel on Culture, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, Eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, p. 172. Simmel, G.: ‘Bridge and door’ (1909), Simmel on Culture, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby, Eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1997, p. 172. Kracauer: The Mass Ornament, p. 183. My own translation. Panoptikum, Munchen: Knorr & Hirth, 1930, pp. 237–8. Originally appeared in New Society, vol, 48, no. 861, 5 April 1979: 26–7. Banham, R.: The Architecture of the WellTempered Environment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 74, 165. Lawson, F.: Hotels and Resorts: Planning, Design and Refurbishment, Oxford: ButterworthArchitecture, 1995, p. 206. Katz, M.: ‘The Hotel Kracauer’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Critical Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999: 140. Sneck, S.: The Night Clerk, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965, p. 28. Mathias, B.: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature, London: Camden House, 2006, p. 57. Mathias, B.: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature, London: Camden House, 2006, p. 57.

23

24

25

26

27

28 29 30

31

Mathias, B.: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature, London: Camden House, 2006, p. 434. Mathias, B.: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature, London: Camden House, 2006, p. 436. Mathias, B.: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature, London: Camden House, 2006, p. 13. Giedion, S.: Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941, p. 210. With the introduction of mechanical transportation, lifts or escalators, guests did not have to climb stairs any longer. Consequently, the value of a room did not have to be determined by the ease of reaching it. Lifts not only eliminated the declining value of rooms on higher floors, they also brought a new element into the lobby space. Bennett, Arnold: Imperial Palace (1930), London: Cassell, 1969, p. 1. Roth, J.: Hotel Savoy (1924), London: Overlook TP, 2003, p. 11. Boomer, L.: Hotel Management: Principles and Practice, New York: Harper Brothers, 1931, p. 151. Portman and Barrett, 1976, quoted in Berens, C.: Hotel Bars and Lobbies, New York: McGrawHill, 1997, p. 137.

71 The architectonics of the hotel lobby

4 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys Greg Votolato

The steamship era – ‘monstrous palaces of gorgeous sloth and immoral ease’1 When steamship services began on the North Atlantic and the great inland waterways of Europe and North America in the late 1830s, they cut travel times dramatically and provided relatively predictable services, first only for the rich but soon also for the mass migration of Europeans to the United States. Whereas steerage passengers arriving at their destinations would take up residence, typically, in the rooming houses and tenement apartments of ethnic neighbourhoods, many of the wealthier business travellers or tourists, stopping in Boston, Philadelphia or New York following a voyage, required a hotel and wanted one that would greet them in style. According to the architectural critic and cultural historian, Russell Lynes, ‘the old traditions of inn-keeping, of crowding the guests into trundle beds, or making them sleep on floors, of courtyards filled with chattering peddlers and creaking carriages, of lobbies which were also barrooms, and room clerks who were also bartenders’ would give way by the 1830s to altogether higher expectations.2 Such expectations were stimulated by the opening, in 1829, of the first modern palace hotel, Tremont House in Boston (fig. 4.1). Designed by Isaiah Rogers, the son of a Massachusetts family of shipbuilders, Tremont House was a fourstorey, Greek Revival structure, reputed to be the largest building in America at the time, but also, more significantly, the first luxury hotel in the world and a model of comfort, elegance and ingenuity for all those that would follow. That new breed of luxury hotels built in the mid nineteenth century aspired to the splendour of European royal palaces or great London gentlemen’s clubs, as did the steamers on the Atlantic or the Mississippi River at that time and, from the 1870s, as did George Mortimer Pullman’s Palace Railroad Cars. According to Mark Twain, for ordinary people living along the banks of America’s great waterways, those elaborate steamboats ‘were palaces; they tallied with the citizen’s dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it’.3 Thus, the evolution of comfort, luxury and splendour in the design of transport vehicles matched, precisely, the accommodations travellers wished to find when they arrived in the lobbies of nineteenth-century hotels. Conceptually and typologically innovative, Tremont House boasted many spatial and technical ‘firsts’. The building was planned around a large, domed reception hall, typically the heart of later hotels, from which all other public rooms and the bedroom corridors led. Its plan also established the fundamental distinction between single and double bedrooms. This became the first hotel with indoor plumbing, providing eight toilets on the ground-floor and devoting its basement to a series of elaborate baths with running water, pumped by a steam engine to rooftop storage tanks, then gravity-fed through the building and heated locally by gas burners. Running water to the kitchen and laundry made preparation of meals, dishwashing and housekeeping considerably more efficient for the staff. According to the historian 72 Greg Votolato

4.1 Façade of Tremont House, Boston, 1829

Talbot Hamlin, ‘In this building, for the first time in America, if not in the world, mechanical equipment became an important element in architectural design’,4 and that impression of high technology would be made first in the lobbies of even the most conservatively styled hotels throughout their later development. By providing a grand portico leading directly into the first genuine reception lobby, Rogers altered the character of the building from that of an inn to the modern hotel. The arriving visitor would henceforth be greeted outside by the doorman and then, in the lobby, by a receptionist, stationed permanently at a desk that became the communication centre of the hotel, registering guests, holding their keys, valuables, mail and messages, communicating with rooms and suites through a system of ‘speaking tubes’, the latter typical of the many new devices that helped to publicise the hotel, and providing many other discreet services. From there too, bell-boys would collect the visitors’ luggage for delivery to their rooms, page guests in the public spaces, and attend to other personal needs of the patrons. Thus, reception became the calm, glittering domain of an all-powerful concierge, whose omnipotence would ensure the guests’ satisfaction in every way. 73 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

Charles Dickens, staying at the Tremont House in 1842, noted that, ‘our bedroom was spacious and airy’5 and that the hotel had ‘more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember or the reader would believe’.6 All of this was contrived to create a dream world of luxury and comfort for the well-heeled traveller. Russell Lynes described the building as, indeed, a palace for the people, not only in its elegant structure, its mosaic marble floors, and richly carpeted corridors, its drawing rooms, reading rooms, ladies’ parlor, and its decorations in the very latest French taste, but in its treatment of guests as well. Here was service such as no one but the very rich, and they only in their own homes, had ever dreamed of before.7 In 1830, the building was published in A Description of the Tremont House, with Architectural Illustrations, a book that became a manual for hotel design, picturing Rogers’s original scheme, a layout that remained in common use for large hotels up to the mid twentieth century. Thus, Tremont House quickly became the model for other palace hotels built in major cities during the following decades, some of them also designed by Rogers. Among the most significant of these was Astor House, constructed in 1836 on a prominent site to the west side of Broadway in New York City. The owner was John Jacob Astor, and his intention was simply to build the most palatial hotel in the world. Astor House was an enlarged, six-storey version of Tremont House, but with shops accessed from the pavement occupying the building’s three façades at street level. Like Tremont House, this hotel employed the latest technology to provide its patrons with the ultimate in comfort, luxury and diversion. All of its 309 rooms or suites were equipped with gaslights, and it provided toilets and bathrooms on each floor for convenience. Most significantly here, the building’s open courtyard, planted with shade trees, was roofed in 1852 by a glazed cast-iron vault designed by the New York pioneer of iron construction, James Bogardus, creating a year-round space that became one of the city’s most fashionable restaurants and bars, both newly patronised by a wealthy clientele of both hotel guests and local denizens in the middle years of the century. Such internal ‘palm courts’ became the fashionable norm as an element of the main circulation and reception spaces of large hotels, and the proximity of shops established a close relationship between the hotel lobby and access to goods and services for travelling members of the new consumer society. Meanwhile, in England, the birthplace of the iron railway track and the steam locomotive, rapid development of the railway network quickly led to the virtual merger of two new building types, the hotel and the railway station, a development that had significant consequences for the purpose and form of the hotel lobby in similar structures around the world during the heyday of train travel. 74 Greg Votolato

Philip Hardwick’s 1851 design for the Great Western Hotel at London’s Paddington Station and the extraordinary neo-Gothic Midland Grand Hotel, designed in 1865 by George Gilbert Scott as the frontage of St Pancras Station, also a major London terminus, are but two of many nineteenth-century hotels constructed as part of a railway station and hotel complex. For travellers, this arrangement had clear advantages. The first brochure for the Hotel Terminus, Paris, which was similarly linked directly with the platforms of SaintLazare Station, quoted a guest’s appreciation for the convenience offered by such a facility: At St-Lazare I walk straight into the Hotel Terminus, giving my luggage chit to the porter, and already I’m in bed. On departure my ticket is brought to my room, my luggage registered without my having to leave the entrance hall. Amply warned I reach my compartment, in my slippers.8 Thus, the linkage of the two building types through the hotel lobby provided a seamless experience for the modern rail traveller.

4.2 Grand Gallery of reception spaces, Ritz, London, by Mewès and Davis

Edwardian palaces – ‘That holy of holies, the main lobby’9 In the early years of the twentieth century, the large city hotel entered a mature phase of spatial development and stylistic elaboration calculated to excite and delight its patrons. Among the grandest of these, the Ritz in London stands out for the combination of its palatial sobriety, advanced American steel and concrete construction, its elegant Louis XVI interiors by the Anglo-French architectural practice of Mewès and Davis and the building’s fluent sequence of reception spaces described as the Grand Gallery (fig. 4.2). This was planned as a wide arcade entered from the main doors on the building’s Arlington Street side and crossed at its midpoint by a secondary axis, linking the hotel’s entrance from Piccadilly with an extravagantly detailed palm court, raised above the level of the main axis by three broad steps. This Palm Court, or Winter Garden, as it was originally called, featured an iron-framed glass roof, a fountain sculpted in marble and gilded metal, spectacular electric chandeliers and French neo-classical furniture produced by Waring and Gillow of London. This area of the lobby, in particular, anticipated the glamorous, hotel-like first-class interiors soon to be designed by Mewès and Davis for a series of magnificent North Atlantic liners operated by the Hamburg–Amerika Line and Cunard. These ships included the Blue Riband-winning Imperator and the much-admired Aquitania. The culmination of the Ritz’s sculpted arcade plan is the restaurant, in which the richness and sophistication of Escoffier’s haute cuisine was matched by the quality of Mewès and Davis’ décor, executed in veined marbles, gilded bronze and sparkling crystal, with various sculpted figures populating the room’s imposing sideboard and guarding its entrance. The restaurant could also be entered directly from Piccadilly, facilitating public access 75 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

to this celebrated London eatery. It is in such spaces that the grand hotel’s private residential function merged with its role as an important civic amenity. Ritz hotels appeared in many of the major cities of the world, following the models established by César Ritz in his Paris and London venues, and these later buildings established a reputation for the warm welcome they offered their patrons. This necessitated lobbies spacious enough to accommodate platoons of hotel staff deployed to greet arriving guests, to deal with their extensive quantities of luggage, to facilitate and minimise the check-in formalities and to conduct patrons and their retinues of valets, maids and secretaries to their rooms. To do this with little fuss and disturbance to other guests, but with a dignified ceremonial display, was the goal of efficient lobby design. The London Ritz achieves this by providing long vistas, quiet vestibules and alcoves, screens of columns and changes of floor level, in addition to its potted palms, carefully arranged furniture groupings, a burbling fountain, thick carpeting, large areas of mirror and glittering ornamental distractions in every direction. In the age of the railway and ocean liner, such urban palaces were a central part of a highly integrated travel experience that buffered their guests from the stresses and strains of arrival and departure, that glorified the well-todo guest and that provided a sophisticated and glamorous amenity, redolent of the adventure and excitement of travel, for the metropolitan community. Modernism – transatlantic style By the late 1920s, the classical grandeur of hotel architecture in the belle époque was being overtaken by the decorative modernism popularised by the Paris Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts held in 1925. Although the nature of travel remained essentially as it had been in the years prior to the First World War, its image was changing in relation to the livelier tempo of modern life in the age of the machine. It is not surprising, then, that new hotel lobbies reflected that rapid pace inspired by technological developments such as air travel, the automobile and mass-communication media. Aspects of the art deco style, such as the extensive use of tinted, engraved and shaped mirrors, helped to animate the grand reception rooms of large hotels, as seen in the various extensions and alterations made to the grand, late-Victorian structure of Claridge’s in London, by Basil Ionides and Oswald Milne between 1925 and 1936 (fig. 4.3). These included the replacement of an outdated carriage drive with an extended reception lobby better suited to the arrival and departure of motorised taxis and limousines. Milne’s decoration of the new lobby combined the hard geometries of high inter-wars modernism with the luxuries of fullblown art deco, retaining the regal formality of older parts of the building while providing an up-to-the-minute welcome for the Jazz Age guest. Claridge’s lift lobby represents the full expression of such 76 Greg Votolato

4.3 Lobby space of Claridge’s Hotel, by Ionides and Milne, 1925–36

a synthesis, mixing traditional features with the simplified abstract geometries of twentieth-century modern art. Milne’s 1930 revamp establishes a classical processional route through two cubic anterooms leading into the octagonal lift lobby, its shallow arches supporting a domed ceiling. Within this rigid plan, Milne employed a palette of subtle colours for walls framed by ebonised woodwork, silver-grey dentil cornices, white stone floors, wrought-iron doors glazed with decorative panels by Lalique, rectilinear furniture with rich cubist-inspired upholstery and bold geometric carpets in black and cream wool by Marion Dorn. Although most lobbies of the inter-wars period, such as Claridge’s, have been remodelled over the years, it is still possible to reflect on their character by looking through the lens of Hollywood. In his set designs for the 1932 modern morality tale, Grand Hotel, the head of MGM’s art department, Cedric Gibbons, employed the motif of the revolving door as the major planning device for the lobby of a fictitious Berlin hotel, through which pass a variety of characters who represent the major social issues of the time, sexual liberation and exploitation, class mobility, financial insecurity, psychological instability, insatiable consumerism and a craving for the luxury, glamour and adventure of the modern peripatetic life. Here, characters played by John Barrymore, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford engage in a drama of briefly overlapping lives played out in the hotel’s private bedrooms and the public spaces of its lobby, the restaurant and bar, but, most prominently, around a vast, circular reception desk immediately 77 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

opposite the revolving-door entrance. The desk sits upon a floor of black and white chequered tiles warped into a swirling pattern of overlapping and concentric circles that animate the space and enhance the sense of continual human movement, a roulette wheel of arrivals and departures in this palace dedicated to the art of transit. The panoptic desk itself also signifies the omniscience of the hotel staff at every level of its operation, from the manager-in-chief to the humblest chambermaid. From this vantage point, everything is seen, but little is said unless it concerns the settlement of the bill. During the 1930s, as annual holidays from work and greatly expanded transport networks were making travel accessible to people of all social classes and a wider spectrum of incomes, new hotels were built to provide the experience of a grand hotel at less grandiose rates. The Midland Hotel in the English seaside town of Morecombe was such a holiday destination, located directly between the railway station and the beach. Designed by Oliver Hill in 1934, this Streamline Moderne structure features circles in both plan and detail reminiscent of those used by Gibbons in his sets for Grand Hotel. At Morecombe, the main entrance to the curving façade is located at its centre, through a circular tower that leads to reception and houses a spiral staircase rising to the three floors of bedrooms. The circular theme is reinforced by a ground-floor cafe (now the Rotunda Bar), also planned around a sequence of concentric rings, its walls of curving glass offering patrons spectacular panoramic views of Morecombe Bay. Built by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, this hotel represented the democratisation of luxurious leisure, its architecture providing a stylish but less formal reception to the middle-class visitors it courted. Cars and jets – driveway and porte cochère Following the Second World War, the development of a car culture, begun in the USA, influenced the design of hotels that greeted their guests in striking new ways. With the construction, in the Eisenhower years, of an improved interstate highway system, it became possible for middle-class Americans living in the cold north-eastern states to drive themselves south to the warmth of Florida, where they could play golf and relax in the sun or in the shade of a palm tree during the winter months. The attachment of that post-war generation of Americans to their large, comfortable Buicks and Chryslers ensured the near complete abandonment of the long-distance train for such journeys. And for those who didn’t want to drive their own cars south, the arrival of jet airliners in the late 1950s encouraged a fly–drive rental market, enabling vacationers to maintain their automobility while staying in an entirely fresh generation of ocean-side hotels, in destinations such as the new resort of Bal Harbor in Miami Beach. There, the New York architect Morris Lapidus created an ensemble of three highly original hotels, on adjacent sites, between 1953 and 1956: the Fontainebleau (1953) (figs. 4.4 and 4.5), the Eden Roc (1955) (fig. 4.6) and the Americana (1956) (fig. 4.7). 78 Greg Votolato

4.4 Ground-floor plan of Fountainebleau, by Lapidus, 1953 4.5 Contemporary image of lobby space in the Fountainebleau Hotel

79 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

4.6 Ground-floor plan of Eden Roc, by Lapidus, 1955

Approached by a wide serpentine driveway from the main road, Collins Avenue, the porte cochère marking the entrance to the Fontainebleau was, itself, the size of a typical city-hotel lobby. There, under the shade of a dramatically cantilevered concrete canopy, the visitor would alight from private car or taxi and enter a world of timeless tropical fantasy mingling imagery from eighteenth-century France, the Italian baroque, modern ocean liners and Caribbean ‘tiki’ huts, the styles mingled and presented on the colossal scale of a Hollywood stage set. All three hotels featured lobbies and associated public rooms expanded over two floors, presenting few if any doors or other obstacles to a continuous flow of space stretching out into lush gardens and ultimately to the white sandy beach beyond. As extensions of the lobby, the gardens were furnished with pools, cabanas, bars and lush tropical planting in strong geometric compositions, echoing the serpentine curves or sharp angularity of the particular hotel’s 80 Greg Votolato

4.7 Ground-floor plan of Americana, by Lapidus, 1956

architecture. Dramatically sculptural staircases featured prominently in all three lobbies, providing elevated views of the vast interior spaces and offering opportunities for spectacular entrances into those reception areas. Lapidus employed the familiar theme of circularity in the plan of the Americana’s main reception, while confronting the guest with the tropical character of the hotel immediately upon arrival. At the centre of the space, he placed an inverted conical terrarium two storeys in height, complete with alligators and embellished with Mayan-influenced stonework. Around this extravagant conceit, and suspended over a lily pond, wrapped a modernistic open-tread staircase, which provided graduated views into the lush exotic vegetation and wildlife contained within the terrarium. Although Lapidus hotels provided spacious bedrooms, commodious bathrooms and large balconies, it was the exoticism and glamour of their lobbies that distinguished them and, indeed, made 81 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

them notorious among modernist architects and critics. The owner of the Eden Roc, when commissioning Lapidus, told the architect, ‘I don’t care if it’s Baroque or Brooklyn, just get me plenty of glamour and make sure it screams luxury!’10 Satisfying such a demand, in a highly creative blending of modernism with a range of eclectic references, brought upon Lapidus the eternal wrath of the critical establishment whenever they deigned to comment on his work. For the guests, however, such entertaining, joyfully exuberant planning and decoration directly addressed the holiday spirit in which most of them came to Miami, and it satisfied their desire to escape routine, practicality and everyday common sense. The lobbies of these buildings suggested romance, glamour and the exotic in generous helpings, and they anticipated in many ways the era of postmodern irony and eclecticism in their use of history as an architectural dressing-up trunk. Fifty years on, it is easier to appreciate both the humour in these designs and the technical inventiveness that made them so appealing to their aspirational clientele. All built on strict budgets, the Miami Beach hotels cleverly cloaked their standard mid-century steel and concrete construction in a variety of materials selected for their visual impact and potential to convey the tropical themes with which Lapidus enlivened his interiors. In the lower lobby of the Fontainebleau, for example, the architect wrapped bare concrete columns in inexpensive split bamboo, complementing the rattan furniture arranged in casual groupings within an area of the lobby dedicated to shopping for gifts, souvenirs, leather goods and vacation clothing. However, for maximum impact, that hotel’s main entrance lobby was finished in more expensive veined marbles and was illuminated by huge crystalline chandeliers suspended within shallow gilded domes, cleverly creating the impression of a higher ceiling than the building’s frame allowed. Such inventive use of decoration to provide a sense of grandeur and the combination of cheap materials, such as bamboo, common terrazzo banded with brass, mosaic tiling, vinyl and cast concrete decorative panels, with expensive rosewood veneers and gilded metals, created an overall effect of warmth and luxury that appealed to New York shopkeepers and Hollywood movie moguls alike. Despite their poor critical reception, these and other Lapidus hotels in Miami and around the Caribbean set a new design agenda for vacation destinations in the 1950s. They have influenced the composite styling of hotel lobbies around the world in the last fifty years and are, themselves, undergoing a renaissance of popularity and massively expensive renovations in the twenty-first century. The North American car culture also spawned a genre of more casual, lower-rent roadside lodgings in the 1920s and 1930s that nonetheless welcomed their guests in novel and diverting ways. They traded under a number of titles, including tourist cabins, motor courts, motels, tourist cottages and roadside hotels, among others, but what they generally had in common was a service station, a restaurant and rooms for the overnight accommodation of passing motorists. Mainly 82 Greg Votolato

4.8 Pines Camp Lodgings along Route 41, 1920s

situated in undeveloped stretches of US highways, the best of them were sited near beauty spots or other sorts of tourist attraction, although many were simply convenient stops for business travellers or truckers. Many attracted the motorist’s attention by employing locally themed names, signage and extravagant external ornament, as demonstrated by the Wigwam Village near Cave City, Kentucky, in traditional Indian Territory. This motor court, one of seven belonging to a chain built in the early 1930s, was planned in a semicircle of tipi-shaped cabins, reached by a curving driveway leading from US Route 31, where a larger reception tipi stood centrally on the site. All signage was painted ornamentally over the exterior of this main structure, which was also identified by three gasoline pumps located directly in front of its entrance. Such treatment of the building’s architecture as a sign was studied, famously, by architects and theorists Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Venturis assessed these manifestations of commercial roadside architecture as inspiration for a serious shift from the tenets of functionalism toward a semiotic approach to design. Inside the astounding conical reception pavilion of the Wigwam Village was a circular room accommodating a diner, which also sold motor oil and other automobilia and where the tired traveller could hire a tipi-cabin for the night. This composite space – shop, cafe and hotel reception – provided a typically cosy, personal and characterful welcome for the residential guest and the passer-by alike. No luggage needed to pass through this space, as the guest would drive directly to the designated cabin and unpack the car without the assistance of a porter. While wigwams or tipis became a popular theme for such lodgings coast to coast, Dutch windmills, Chinese pagodas, war surplus bomber planes, gigantic coffee pots (decades before Claes Oldenburg) and even a full-size mock zeppelin served as eye-popping reception pavilions cum architectural advertisements to draw in 83 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

customers. While many such businesses shared the standard planning device of a detached reception–cafe–service station at the roadside and a row of cottages behind, the cottages might be arranged either in a semicircle, a straight line or a three-sided rectangle with parking, in some cases enhanced by landscaped gardens and a playground in the courtyard space. Aerialism and spectacle – lobbies in motion Semiotic critiques also appeared in analyses of more upscale urban hotel designs from the 1970s. The literary critic and Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson described the Bonaventure Hotel, built in Los Angeles in 1974–6 by the architect–developer John Portman, as a mature postmodern building owing to meanings he found in its external forms and its lobbies (fig. 4.9). Unlike the roadside architecture so admired by the Venturis, according to Jameson the Bonaventure presented itself as an abstract sculpture, inserted into the urban fabric of Los Angeles as a magical object with no identifiable relation to anything around it. The five mirrored cylinders that comprised its thirty-five-storey structure were arranged according to a rigid, geometrical plan, with the tallest cylinder located at the centre accommodating an atrium lobby. Although the building constituted a large and striking feature of the LA cityscape, its three entrances were relatively insignificant, compared with the grand portes cochères of traditional city hotels, and totally unlike the seductive entrances to the Miami hotels by Lapidus. This suggested that the contrast between the inscrutable minimalism of the exterior and the promise of an exciting surprise within was what made the Bonaventure such a perennially popular Los Angeles attraction. Jameson declared the space inside the Bonaventure to be of an entirely new type that rejected the world around it, an image distorted and reflected back at itself by the building’s impenetrable mirrored surfaces, like a pair of reflective Ray-Bans, and constituting a closed-off world, a metaphorically gated community. Indeed, the main Figueroa Street entrance led directly into a shopping centre, from which it was necessary to take an escalator to reach the reception desk. The other two entrances were even more remote from the heart of the lobby, which required an elaborate system of signage to locate. Yet these seemingly insignificant access points exaggerated the shock delivered by the atrium lobby, when once found, which exploded into view with its looming volume, dramatically cantilevered galleries and gilded pod elevators that provided their passengers with a spectacular experience as they soared up through the space. Portman’s escalators and elevators, presented as moving sculptures, according to Jameson, ‘designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper’,11 transforming the lobby into a gigantic self-propelling machine in which the visitor was immersed in an entirely fantastical kinetic experience of abstract form and space. This sensation became most extreme as the transparent elevator pods burst through the roof 84 Greg Votolato

4.9 Lobby space of Bonaventure Hotel, by Portman, 1974–6

85 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

of the lobby to climb up the outside of the building, providing increasingly dramatic city views as they rose to access the residential floors and, finally, to arrive at a revolving restaurant on the top level of the central tower, where the changing view of the city shifted from a rapid vertical to a slow horizontal motion. However, the exhilaration of the ascent, in Jameson’s view, was not sustained by the trip back down to the lobby floor, which presented a constant swirl of circular movement in the horizontal plane compounded by the vertical and diagonal thrusts of elevators and escalators: The descent is dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake [reflecting pools]. What happens when you get there is something else, which can only be characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby.12 By comparison with the panoptic representation of the Gibbons’ lobby in Grand Hotel, the Bonaventure certainly represented postmodern chaos. Yet it can also be seen as an image of Los Angeles itself, the ultimate city in motion, a shifting, fugitive arena for mechanically driven human activity. And, in that sense, this hotel may not be such a rejection of the world outside. Whereas the hotel bedroom is typically a sanctuary of calm and stability, in the context of travel and its inherent disorientation, the lobby is the architectural space par excellence of transition, and the apparent chaos of the Bonaventure lobby may be an apt expression of such a jet-age human situation, redolent of uncertainty, confusion and anxiety. It is replete with metaphors of transit, establishing its identity in relation to the situation of its guests, and it can be read as a sympathetic nod to their predicament as survivors of the highway, the railway, the airport and the seaport. Against the chain – boutique hotels With issues of sustainability clouding the previously universal acceptance that we, as humans, have the right to travel anywhere, anytime, by any means, the hotel itself is now subject to the same environmentally conscious scrutiny as cars, airliners and cruise ships. However, while travel continues in all its forms and with all its consequences, the lobby will increasingly become a focus for energy conservation and associated sustainability issues. What will not change is the emotional significance of the hotel lobby. And thus, arriving at any hotel, grand or humble, may inspire a range of bland or intense feelings in guests, depending on their circumstances. The reception lobby absorbs and processes all this turmoil, attitude and expectation on the basis of its design as well as the efficiency of its management 86 Greg Votolato

and the appropriateness of its service to the expectations of the guest. Today, the global hotel industry is dominated by chains such as Hilton, Westin, Ramada, Novotel and Holiday Inn, whose primary virtue is standardisation. Their lobbies look alike, and they all look like an airport terminal. As a result, some smaller entrepreneurs have entered the field to provide travellers’ accommodations that offer something out of the ordinary in terms of design and ambience. Such was the case of Ian Schrager, who turned from managing nightclubs, including the famed Studio 54 in the 1970s, to building a chain of specialist hotels since the 1980s. His concept of relatively small venues, offering personal service and, above all, high-concept design at a range of prices, from ‘cheap chic’ (the Hudson, NYC), to ultra-luxury (St Martins Lane, London), became a runaway success, inspiring many spin-offs and imitators worldwide. Among his earliest projects was the renovation of the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, with a design by the French architect and product designer Philippe Starck. With the opening of this revolutionary boutique hotel in 1988, the lobby became a gallery of contemporary design in which the hotel guest or local visitor could experience the latest fashions in interior architecture, furniture and decorative art. The linear space of the Royalton lobby, presented like a fashion-show runway, offered ancillary spaces stepped down from the main axis to provide intimate areas where small groups of patrons could enjoy semi-privacy, while still viewing the main action, cosseted amidst the surrealist postmodern chairs, sofas and associated products designed by Starck to challenge and amuse a visually sophisticated clientele. The reception desk was reduced to the status of a minor distraction, while the cocktail bar and restaurant entrances took precedence. Uniforms of the lobby staff were less military than Milan, further contributing to the ambience of catwalk chic. Perhaps the most striking parts of the Royalton’s public space were the toilets, in which purpose-designed sanitaryware confronted the visitor with an ambiguous sculptural environment in which the function of each exquisite object was not clear, and where shadows of the opposite sex in the adjacent chamber could be seen moving behind frosted-glass screens. Whether one found this unnerving or exciting, it certainly was different. Yet, after twenty years of innovation, the boutique hotel concept has also become the standard fare of several international chains and now may seem almost as tired as the globalised blandness of the older chains. Now, a hip W Hotel lobby is nearly as predictable in its appearance and in the experience it offers as a Holiday Inn lobby, whether it is in Boston or Barcelona. While the travelling rich are, as always, treated to something extraordinary, both in transit and at the moment of arrival, the majority of travellers are today greeted at a Westin or a W by hotel lobbies offering the same familiar corporate design found in the cabins of Boeing jet airliners and intercity train carriages the world over. 87 The hotel lobby and local/global journeys

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7

Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York, 1954), pp. 81. Ibid., pp. 81–89. Ibid. Talbot Hamlin, quoted in Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, 1955), p. 694. Charles Dickens, American Notes (London, 1850), p. 49 (online text: http://gutenberg.org) (accessed 14 December 2009). Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p.82.

88 Greg Votolato

8

9 10

11

12

D’Ormesson, Jean (Ed.), Grand Hotel, The Golden Age of Palace Hotels, An Architectural and Social History, London, 1984, p. 65. Ibid., p. 10. Duttmann, M. and Schneider, F., Morris Lapidus, Architect of the American Dream, Basel, 1992, p. 109. Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke, 1991, http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/ jameson/jameson.html (accessed 3 May 2010). Ibid.

5 Shifting spaces Graeme Brooker

The title of this essay, ‘Shifting spaces’, is used to describe the transformation of an existing building when it is redesigned to accommodate a new use. Shifting is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as a word that is used to depict something that is ‘changing position or direction’.1 The creation of a new programme, such as a hotel, in a space that was built for something entirely different, symbolises a shift away from the building’s previous use. In the OED, shifting is also described as ‘an expedient or ingenious device for effecting purpose, often through evasive or deceitful means’.2 Both descriptions of the word illustrate the underlying themes of this essay. The complex process of creating a space that is new, within a space that is old, is a method of design that involves shifting the qualities and characteristics of the existing building into a new dimension. This change is realised by first analysing the host and then formulating a strategy with which to transform it. The realisation of the new interior through the creation of new spaces, and the design of new elements such as furniture and surfaces could be described as the tactical deployment of expedient devices: the interior elements that are used to facilitate the occupation of these new spaces. This essay will examine a series of hotel lobbies that have been constructed inside the shell of an extant building. It proposes that these types of space offer a distinct contrast to new-build hotel lobbies. They do this by embodying an alternative type of interior that is generated from the specifics of the site in which they are to be created. This makes the hotel and its lobby site-specific and closely related to the conditions of the existing building. This process is partly reliant on the character and qualities of the host building to be reused, and it is dependent on the desire of the designer to accentuate or suppress those qualities. It is a course of action that usually results in a unique fusion of new and old spaces. It is a procedure that can create an unusual and distinct environment, one that is impossible to generate in a new-build project. As Rodolfo Machado states: In remodeling, the past takes on a value far different from that in the usual design process, where form is generated from ‘scratch’ . . . In the process of remodeling the past takes on a greater significance because it, itself, is the material to be altered and reshaped.3 When an existing building is redeveloped, the creation of its new interior suggests a disconnection between the past and the present life of that space. This is not always true. It is up to the designer of the space to explore and develop this disjunction, and to respond to the challenges of the new programme and the way that it fits into the building. As Breitling and Cramer state: ‘Every urban situation and every building has its own specific and embedded value – it is the designer’s task to perceive and discover it.’4 89 Shifting spaces

The task of the designer is to respond to these values and then begin the process of understanding the existing building. This is in order to accept its new use. This is a process that Fred Scott describes as ‘stripping out’. It is a process that can be used, ‘to establish a means by which the designer can begin a negotiation between the ideal and the actual, and also begin the process of intervention by which disparate parts must be made to cohabit’.5 This chapter will explore three examples of shifting spaces, all based in the UK. Each is a project that has been created in an adapted existing building, in an unusual manner. In the process, they have resulted in interior spaces that are closely derived from the qualities of the host building within which they are contained. In all three case studies, the new is informed to varying degrees by the old building in which it is placed.

5.1 Lobby and corridor space in Malmaison Hotel, Oxford

The Malmaison Hotel, Oxford There has been a prison in the centre of Oxford since the thirteenth century. Oxford Castle, which was originally built for William the Conqueror, outlived its purpose in 1230 and was then recast as the city gaol. After it was condemned as a space unfit for human habitation in the 1770s, the prison was extensively remodelled into the basic form that is still extant today: four wings surrounding a courtyard. An ethical dimension infused further remodelling in the 1850s, when the spatial qualities of the prison were required to exemplify social reform through cleansing and moral rectitude. Ideas that had currency in prison design in the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries were Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and the ‘separate system’. The Panopticon allowed the surveillance and control of the prisoner, through observation from a central point. The separate system was a form of prisoner incarceration that attempted to rehabilitate inmates through enforced, cell-based, monastic reflection. Both systems resulted in ordered interior spaces that often consisted of long wings of stacked single cells, which could be viewed by a small number of guards. Both ideas enforced minimal contact between detainees and were designed to subdue and eventually nullify the identity of the inmate. This ensured the inmates’ subordination to the organisation of the institution in which they found themselves. Later remodelling in the nineteenth century was dominated by the development of the A-wing, a linear corridor of stacked separate cells accessed by steel stairs and walkways. This change reinforced the moral dimension of the prison and its role. Upon arrival at the prison, the detainee, before being processed and incarcerated within the cells, would pass through the front of the gaol and directly under the chapel. A quick glimpse up into the chapel from the entrance reinforced the religious component of the moral rectitude and rehabilitation that the prisoners were about to experience. Because of its relatively small size, Oxford prison was overlooked for redevelopment and so it remained untouched for many years. 90 Graeme Brooker

5.2 Site plan of Malmaison Hotel, Oxford

Prisoners were still without bathroom facilities in their cells and were ‘slopping out’ when it was finally closed in 1996. Until 2001, it stood empty, occasionally flickering to life as a perfect period backdrop for Victorian prison films and episodes of Bad Girls. The development and subsequent remodelling of the complex were driven by the desire to reverse the insular and secretive former world of the prison. An aspiration to offer the site back to the city and its residents is described by the project architect Catherine Yateman as a process of opening up the site: ‘We have turned a place of fear and internment into a place of joy, and opened up a forgotten chunk of the city.’6 Five design practices were appointed to create apartments, bars, restaurants, shops, a museum and visitor centre. Architects Design Partnership (ADP) was commissioned to convert the prison into a luxury boutique hotel for the Malmaison group. Jestico and Whiles were appointed lead interior designers for the project. The prison is adjacent to the mound, the original Norman castle. Originally, it consisted of an assorted collection of prison buildings, all enclosed by a high wall. The qualities of the site, and the existing buildings inspired a forceful strategy by which to return the place to the public domain. Yateman explains: ‘The site had been locked away 91 Shifting spaces

5.3 (facing page) Entrance of Malmaison Hotel, Oxford

for 1,000 years, it needed a series of robust moves and bold incisions by which to open it back up to the City.’7 The design team assembled a set of principles by which all of the new interventions were to be guided. Therefore, each proposal would have a sound intellectual underpinning. These were sympathetic to the host but, at the same time, were not set out to revere the set of existing buildings. Two of the fifteen principles stated: To ensure that design proposals are responsive to functional requirements – just as historic buildings were designed to meet the needs of the time. Alterations to the existing buildings should, wherever possible, be reversible. New work should be distinct from the original, and avoid detracting from it by being clean, simple and unfussy.8 All of the principles allowed a consistency of ideas and language that could be applied to the site. Effectively, this process formed an attitude about the prison that responded to the embedded values of the site. Ultimately, the designers viewed the creation of the hotel as just another stage in the continuous history of the castle. The urban strategy for the whole of the site was one of returning the place to the city. The tall prison walls were breached and opened in four places. Each corresponded to a major road and thus developed a series of routes through the site. The hotel entrance is at the front of the prison, adjacent to the castle mound and next to the old Governor’s House. This entrance was reopened by ADP and cleared of the small ancillary spaces that had grown up inside it. This work revealed a network of original, thirteenth-century groin vaults. The designers placed the hotel lobby, housing the reception and waiting spaces for the guests, in this newly exposed, double-height space. The sequence of different heights of the lobby and the configuration of furniture within the spaces of the entrance make for an intimate and comfortable space. As guests enter the lobby, they can see up into the old chapel above them. This is now the bar, the social hub of the hotel. This sequence and view, from the entrance through the lobby, reenacts the journey of thousands of condemned souls who would have previously passed this place before disappearing into the depths of the gaol. The atmospheric and serene lobby connects to the A-wing via a set of stairs. This is where the majority of the prison cells were once housed. It is now where many of the new hotel rooms are situated. The lobby is flooded with natural light that pours into the space from its glass roof. The spectacular, high-galleried, top-lit wing is the heart of the hotel and it is where the nineteenth-century reformers’ progressive zeal is most evident. As Yatemen suggests: ‘The Victorians were big on fresh air to stop disease, as well as daylight and all-round visibility.’9 The designers wanted to maintain the institutional quality of the prison interior, while providing a luxury hotel experience. They also needed to ensure that it complied with current building and complex 92 Graeme Brooker

93 Shifting spaces

fire-safety legislation. These requirements manifested themselves in a number of bold and intricate measures. The new hotel rooms have been created by joining up three of the existing cells on each floor of the wing. Two are joined together for the bedroom, and one is added for the en-suite bathroom. Each room faces on to the lobby. They are organised as a vertical, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with the doors to each room vertically staggered. Fire regulations ensured that the doors to each cell could not be stacked one above another, a strategy necessary to minimise the spread of smoke within the atrium. The original cell doors have been retained, thus maintaining the institutional feel of the lobby and the link with its past. The quality of their construction as well as their aesthetic values were paramount in this decision. The doors were so well built and well fitted into the cell walls that, as well as stopping the cells’ previous occupants’ attempts to leave, they provided excellent thermal and fire-proofing qualities. This ensured an exacting fit, as well as achieving the building’s fire compliance certification. The upper three floors of rooms are accessed via original stairs and walkways that have been retained in order to provide a direct link to the building’s past. They have been elegantly reworked to allow them also to comply with building regulations. The imperative of surveillance, one of the principles according to which the wing was designed, ensured that any new additions could not disrupt sightlines within the lobby. This was a requirement that led to glass being used within the existing balustrades of the balconies and the stairs. Glass is used for infill panels in order to close the open balustrades. The panels also act as fire baffles: the glass sheets drop below the floor of the balcony in such a way as to restrict the flow of smoke into the lobby. All of the new additions are designed as simply and as unfussily as possible, in order to minimise any distraction from the aesthetic of the prison space. The shift in function, from a prison to a hotel, has resulted in an unusual, one-off interior. The resonance of this space has been generated by a powerful relationship between the brooding physical presence of the prison and the contemporary elements of the new hotel. This has created interior space within which the history of the site is tangible. In an attempt to connect the past and the present life of this building, the designers retain the spatial qualities of the jail. This is a strategy that has produced an exemplary interior, a modern, luxury destination and a new quarter of the city. Hempel Hotel, London

Here, in the space of unrelatedness, the change of environments does not leave a purposive activity behind, but brackets it for the sake of a freedom that can refer only to itself and therefore sinks into relaxation and indifference.10

94 Graeme Brooker

5.4 Lobby of the Hempel Hotel, London 5.5 Ground-floor plan of the Hempel Hotel, London

In his essay ‘The hotel lobby’, initially published in 1963 in Das Ornament Der Masse, Siegfried Kracauer compares the function of the lobby with the rituals and aesthetics of church going. In the essay, he contrasts the guests in a hotel with the members of the congregation. He suggests that: In both places people appear there as guests. But whereas the house of God is dedicated to the service of the one whom people have gone there to encounter, the hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one.11

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5.6 View towards the reception desk of the Hempel Hotel, London

He describes the hotel lobby as a transitional space, a buffer zone where the exterior environment is jettisoned. In turn, the guest can relax, and an indifferent persona can be adopted. This idea is particularly relevant to the atmosphere created in the lobby of the Hempel Hotel, an exclusive, five-star residence that has been carved out of a row of five Georgian townhouses in west London. Anouska Hempel designed the hotel in the late 1990s. It was created as a space that would transform the experience of the weary traveller as they arrived from the street and stepped into the hotel: Crossing the main entrance is almost a mystical experience. Beyond it, the visitor finds a wide empty space, in which the only outstanding element is the monolithic block of the reception desk, which recalls the calm and contemplative atmosphere of a temple.12 Kracauer’s comparison between the lobby and the house of God is reiterated by this description of the hotel entrance. Quasi-religious, mystical language is used to express the transition from the noisy, busy street, to the calming lobby interior. The exclusivity of the hotel and the sequential narrative of this journey are exemplified by the first entrance space: a small white room where the concierge relieves you of your luggage. A sliding glass screen, ironically fashioned to look like a Georgian six-panel door, is triggered by a sensor and opens to reveal the main lobby of the hotel. The lobby is contained within the entire 96 Graeme Brooker

width of three of the five townhouses. The space is bookended by a bar and restaurant in the first and fifth townhouses. Both are accessed behind monolithic screens placed at either ends of the lobby. The reduced, ordered, minimalist, pale-white aesthetic of the interior offers a striking antidote to the noisy street outside. The reception is articulated as a long solid block of stone, perched above an unyielding stand. The screens separating the hall from the bar and restaurant, at either end of the lobby, are articulated as solid walls, containing deep recesses for the fireplaces. In front of both these walls are stepped seats. These are sunk into the ground, with elegant woven bamboo and wicker low tables offering the only colourful alternative to the unrelenting pale-stone interior. The lobby is punctuated by a shaft of natural light that pours in from the roof, six storeys up, and through a sharp aperture carved into the soffit of the space. The religious qualities of the shaft of natural light are acknowledged. The meticulous and crafted elegance of the space is personified in the careful detailing of junctions and materials. Shadow gaps are employed where the wall meets the soffit, to express the clarity of the junctions and articulate their particular and different qualities: the soft edge of the grid of stone tiles articulates the proportions and organisation of the desk, and the recessed seats and fireplace walls, and ultimately the whole room: The visitor will be immediately struck by the openness and simplicity of the materials and colours: beige Portland stone for the floors, golden chalk and sand for the lower floors.13 In this shifting space, the disjunction between the existing building and the new interior is not as pronounced as the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford. Although there is an initially startling and yet ultimately soothing quality to the interior space, the narrative and qualities of the host building and the distinct features of the new lobby and hotel are not entirely at odds with each other. Eighteenth-century Georgian terraced houses were designed and built with distinct constructional, spatial and compositional qualities. Their elegant proportions and robust construction ensured that they were, and still are, highly regarded: In the Georgian era, all of these houses, from the largest to the smallest, were of generally simple and functional design, fronted in red brick with painted wooden window and door trim. The richness of trim and detail was varied to match the class of the occupants, but was invariably handsome, logical and orderly.14 The selective demolition of the ground-floor interior of the townhouses included the removal of internal party walls and chimneybreasts. This was done in order to fashion a clean, unfettered lobby 97 Shifting spaces

space. Stripping out is a part of the design process where the condition and fabric of an existing space can be analysed and measured. Scott describes this process as: The process by which the interventional designer acquires an understanding of the host building with which he or she is engaged. It is to the end of developing a structured affinity, as a preparation for the correspondence between their work and the existing.15 It is a process of valuing, and then editing and deleting. Scott goes on to say: ‘Stripping back is the process of delineation of the qualities of the host building, an analysis of the given.’16 In order to facilitate its adaptation into a hotel, the removal of structural material and decorative elements from the terrace has allowed the designers to fully analyse the conditions of the host building. It is these conditions, their composition and their proportions, that have influenced the form, organisation and the aesthetic of the new hotel lobby. St Martins Lane Hotel, London ‘It’s not about a look, it’s about an attitude. You can’t say it’s minimal, it’s not Art Deco, it’s not Baroque, it’s not really Post modern, it’s not really anything. It’s random. It’s free form, it’s hotel as theatre.’17 The design of any interior is always a consequence of its locality and is thus intrinsically connected to its immediate environment. Whether an outline of a plan on a page, or the adaptation of an existing structure, the distinguishing feature of the practice of creating interior space is the reuse of what is already extant. Shifting the use of a building, from the function that it was intended for, to an entirely different form of occupation, allows the designer to re-imagine the interior in a way in which the drama and theatrical element of the new space can be spectacularly emphasised. The seven-storey, 1960s, concrete-frame tower block, just north of Trafalgar Square, was originally the headquarters of an advertising agency. The concrete-slab frame and post building offered the designers a relatively blank slate with which to work. Non-structural internal partitions could be swept away in order to house 204 rooms and 18,000 square metres of hotel. Whereas, in Oxford, the solid, sturdy, load-bearing interior and exterior walls provided a significant challenge for adaptation, in this project the grid of the structural frame presented a grid of opportunities for the designers. Philippe Starck’s concept was based on the hotel being a space of drama and theatre: ‘Modernity is transparency and energy and dematerialisation. We played with light and colour to give it life. We wanted a boiling pot with the energy of the city.’18 Starck choreographs a ‘stage-set’ lobby on the ground-floor of the hotel. This is formed by a series of overlapping, fluid spaces that are 98 Graeme Brooker

5.7 Seating area in the lobby of St Martins Lane Hotel, London 5.8 Bar and restaurant areas of St Martins Lane Hotel, London

counterpointed by the angular grid of the buildings columns. Six exaggerated columns in the entrance have been beefed up to become almost two metres in diameter. These punctuate the entrance lobby. To the side of these columns is a long, thin, glass and sandstone desk. Among the columns is an assortment of novelty furniture. Stools are shaped like molar teeth; gnomes on toadstools and huge vases of plants lend a theatrical atmosphere to the interior. The lobby drifts into the main restaurant. As you walk through the ground-floor, the ‘hypostyle’ columns sequence the space, choreographing the different environments within the lobby. This is a condition that the designers exaggerate by utilising different furniture and lighting in each space. The main restaurant, Asia de Cuba, is full of typically idiosyncratic furniture and is prefaced by a series of tall, thin tables in the Rum bar at the front of the restaurant. The main dining area is populated with Scandinavian plywood chairs and tables, illuminated by naked light bulbs artfully hung by their flex from the ceiling. In this space, shelves bursting with books, radios and pictures wrap the overstated columns. This overemphasises their cumbersome and ungainly qualities. The light bar sits centrally in the lobby space. In contrast to the restaurant, it is designed to appear as if it is an atmospheric ‘cellar bar’. A series of voids puncturing the ceiling at regular intervals alleviate the overbearing, enclosed atmosphere of the bar. These allow natural light to spill into the space from the second floor of the building. The light 99 Shifting spaces

5.9 Ground-floor plan of St Martins Lane Hotel, London

wells are painted in bright, acidic colours, illuminating the white furniture during the day with coruscating shades, and at night with phosphorescent projections. The modern bistro beside the light bar spills out into a side street. A small sea bar, resplendent with all-white booths and underwater videos, completes the eclectic range of theatrical spaces within the lobby. The adaptation of the existing building has created a fluid interior space, where a variety of dramatic, atmospheric spaces are woven inbetween the structural grid of the building. The project has also been configured as a space to dissolve the identity of the visitor. The intention of the designer is to create a stage upon which the identity of the visitor is altered. Starck pronounced during the opening of the hotel: ‘You are no longer a consumer but an actor’.19 As the client, Ian Schrager, also pointed out: ‘The lobby is to excite you. The rooms are there to calm you down.’20 Ian Schrager describes the design of the hotel as a place where guests should feel part of an atmospheric stage set. He would like the guests to become interchangeable actors and audience members as they enter and use the various rooms of the large lobby space: This smart and modern urban resort further refines the ideas of ‘hotel as theatre’ and ‘lobby socialising’. St Martin’s lobby is a soaring theatrical space, akin to a constantly changing stage set, with eclectic furnishings and distinctive touches everywhere. It is a cosmopolitan Village of six discrete but harmoniously interwoven public spaces.21 In a new-build project, the conception and subsequent progression of an interior space will often take place in conjunction with the development of the exterior. This process will often require an agreed coherence between both inside and outside space. The conception and development of a new-build hotel, and its interior, allow the architects and designers a free hand with which to configure the rooms, lobbies and the other elements of the new space. The only constraining factors are the plot of land on which the hotel is to be built and, of course, the size of the budget. The design of these types of hotel are exemplified by edifices such as John Portman’s Atlanta Marriot, Michael Grave’s Hyatt Regency and Michael Manser’s Hilton at Heathrow. The interior and exterior spaces of these hotels are designed in conjunction with each other to spectacular effect. The interiors of these projects are comparable with other large-scale, branded environments, such as shopping malls, airports and corporate office lobbies, where a similar spatial and material interior language is utilised. In these projects, the lobby exemplifies new-build interior spaces, where the reception is sited in an overlapping and fluid environment, often consisting of cafes, restaurants and shops. Mark Pimlott expertly dissects these types of interior in his book Without and Within: Essays on Territory 100 Graeme Brooker

and the Interior. The author describes these types of space as ‘distended scenes of consumption’22 and that they are environmental ‘types’ that are becoming increasingly evident in many forms of major public space: The most common type of contemporary large-scale space . . . embodies aspects of the corporate lobby, the winter garden, the shopping mall and the transport terminal concourse. These various resemblances are frequently blurred or ambiguous, emphasized by such spaces’ scale and extensiveness. In the largest instances, one passes from one mood to the next in what are represented as a continuous and potentially limitless interior. Their internal diversity of programme and conditions marks them out as environments rather than specific interiors; but interiors are precisely what they are.23 The seamless fluidity of these types of interior space, the ambiguity between inside and outside, as well as their indistinct function and use, entice the visitor to participate in a homogeneous and transitory experience, which, according to Pimlott, has, ‘weaned the captive visitor – obliged, as usual, to be a consumer – from the desire or need for either the actual city or its possibilities’.24 Shifting spaces is a term used to describe a typology of interiors that have been constructed within a building that has been designed for another use. Interior space that has been created within an existing building offers an antidote to the occasionally homogeneous new-build interior. Although the programmatic requirements of the lobby in both a new-build and a reuse project are similar, the spatial atmosphere can differ radically when the hotel is housed inside a building that has been built for a very different previous function. The embedded values of an existing building, as well as the wider cultural landscape, offer the designer a different set of possible responses. Just the fact of choosing to retain an existing building, rather than start from scratch, is in itself an act of resistance to spatial homogeneity. As Breitling states: European and International cities are defined to a large extent by the form and arrangement of their buildings and these ensure that a place remains recognisable over a long period of time.25 Embedded value is a way of describing the method by which the interior and the exterior of a building are surfaces that are charged with a communicative dimension. When this dimension is developed in tandem, as in a new-build project, both surfaces might embody similar qualities, as their conception and construction happen at roughly the same time. When these surfaces are developed at completely different times from each other, then both will not embody the same qualities, unless the designer has deliberately set out to achieve that. 101 Shifting spaces

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11

Onions, C. T.: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary – On Historical Principles, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 1972, reprint, p. 1873. Ibid., p. 1873. Machado, Rodolfo: ‘Toward a theory of remodelling: old buildings as palimpsest’, Progressive Architecture, 1976; cited in Brooker, G. and Stone, S., Rereadings: Interior Architecture and the Design Principles of Remodelling Existing Buildings, RIBA Enterprises, London, 2004, p. 19. Cramer, Johannes and Breitling, Stefan: Architecture in Existing Fabric: Planning, Design, Building, Birkhauser, 2007, p. 24. Scott, Fred: On Altering Architecture, Routledge, 2008, p. 113. Yateman, Catherine: Building Design Magazine, Interiors Supplement, May 2007, p. 20. Yateman, Catherine: Interview by the author with the architect in Oxford, 14 July 2010. Catherine Yateman and ADP compiled the Design Principles of the project. They formed part of the planning proposal. Yateman, Catherine: Building Design Magazine, Interiors Supplement, May 2007, p. 18. Mostedi, Arian: Design Hotels. Architectural Design, Carlos Broto & Josep Minguet Publishers, 1999; quote taken from a sixpage brochure on the hotel adapted from the book. Kracauer, S.: The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard, 1995, p. 175.

102 Graeme Brooker

12

13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

21

22

23 24 25

Mostedi, Arian: Design Hotels. Architectural Design, Carlos Broto & Josep Minguet Publishers, 1999; quote taken from a sixpage brochure on the hotel adapted from the book. Ibid. Pile, John: A History of Interior Design, 3rd edition, Laurence King, 2009, p. 208. Scott, Fred: On Altering Architecture, Routledge, 2008, p. 108. Scott, Fred: ibid., p. 108. Schrager, Ian: cited in ‘It’s showtime’, Caroline Roux, Blueprint Magazine, October 1999, p. 60. Starck, P.: cited in ‘St Martin’s Lane Hotel’, Suzanne Stephens, Architectural Record, January 2000, p. 91. Starck, P.: ibid., p. 91. Schrager, Ian: cited in ‘It’s showtime’, Caroline Roux, Blueprint Magazine, October 1999, p. 60. Riewoldt, Otto: New Hotel Design, Watson Guptill/Laurence King, 2002; Ian Schrager is cited in the St Martin’s Hotel case study, p. 28. Pimlott, M.: Without and Within. Essays on Territory and the Interior, Episode Publishers, 2007, pp. 273–4. Pimlott, M.: ibid., p. 271. Pimlott, M.: ibid., pp. 273–4. Cramer, Johannes and Breitling, Stefan: Architecture in Existing Fabric: Planning, Design, Building, Birkhauser, 2007, p. 18.

6 Tracing tracks Illusion and reality at work in the lobby Rajesh Heynickx

The luxury hotels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be described as the most glamorous, colourful and, at the same time, ‘opaque sites of the psychological topography of modern life’.1 These so-called ‘grand hotels’2 always lead to a wide range of associations: show business and mob deals, richness and adultery, honeymoon and suicide. Offering a home away from home, they succeeded in fusing opposites together. A personal sphere and anonymity, the familiar and the unfamiliar, illusion and reality constantly mixed in the vertical cities grand hotels were. Yet, these hotels not only imitated the urban fabric by installing within their walls a swimming pool, shops and restaurants. Hotel guests were also, like every newcomer in a city, subjected to a (dis)assembling of their identity. They obtained a new identity in the form of a depersonalized room number, or deliberately decided to carve one out when checking in. Of course, even a selfchosen identity was not always coterminous with easy, instant success. In a dark reflection on living at home in the post-1945 world, Theodor Adorno argued that hotels epitomized the twentieth-century, resultless struggle to situate oneself in the world. They embodied an existential homelessness.3 The exact place in the hotel where, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old identities were (un)succesfully reconfigured, was the hotel lobby. Positioned between the public realm (the street) and the private sphere (the hotel room), the lobby became a semipublic gateway to private places. It was the place were the visitor left his/her story at the front desk. Lift-boys, telephone systems and hotel keys instigated a specific type of interaction between the hotel guests and turned the lobby into the stage set of a regime. Thinking with Michel Foucault, who stated that the (honeymoon) hotel was a heterotopia, a place that stands in relation to other sites, but at the same time mirrors, neutralizes or inverts these relations, the lobby can be seen as the incubator of such ‘other place’: it simultanously split and recomposed individual identities.4 Adorno and Foucault were certainly not the first to draw attention to the hotel as a modern play, of which the lobby was the first act or prelude and which reached its finale in the individual guest-rooms. In the Weimar Berlin of the early 1920s, the German Jewish thinker Siegfried Kracauer also tried to understand the topography of modern culture by looking at the Großstadhotel. Kracauer considered hotels as miniature models of the international metropolis and its global culture. The exchange of information, services and goods triggered by the consuming hotel guests reflected the fragmentation and anonymity of a society driven by mass media and tourism. Those who were sitting in the lounge chairs of the lobby were participating in a dissolution of an old collectedness. In a series of essays for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer illuminated that process by opposing the lobby to the traditional church. The rise of a sensus communis, the fusion of individuals in a corporate ‘we’, was possible in the church but not in the lobby, where the fellow hotel 103 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

6.1 Still of the lobby space in the film Grand Hotel, by Edmund Golding, 1932

guest was a stranger, although he slept under the same roof: ‘Whereas in the house of God it is an awaiting within the tension that reveals the preliminariness of names, in the hotel lobby it is a retreat into the unquestioned groundlessness.’5 The hotel flâneur, Kracauer, was touched by the fact that a community characterized by traditional practices and a sense of belonging (Gemeinschaft) was overwhelmed by a more individualistic, competitive and impersonal organization of mere society (Gesellschaft). However, it was not so much the tension between the congregation in the traditional church and its inverted image, the lobby, where an old solidarity was undermined by the peripheral equality of social masks, that turns Kracauer’s reflection into an original one. Its originality stems from the methodological ambition underneath a pessimistic sociology: Kracauer’s examination of the lobby did fit in a quite original phenomenological project. Just as he had done with department stores and employment offices, he tried to define the lobby as a spatial image, a Raumbild, which he considered to be a hieroglyphic that, once deciphered, would reveal the basis of social reality.6 Kracauer, who was trained and had been active as an architect, believed that his own time could be dissected through a secure analysis of its spatial images. Collecting information via detailed, inductive observations would make it possible to look into the social record of a society and to solve all its riddles. Therefore, it is not that surprising that his work on the hotelhalle was originally intended to form a chapter in his book-length essay ‘The detective novel: a philosophical tractate’. Just as the detective in a novel tried to identify the motives of perpetrators through the recovering of tiny details, not infrequently with the hotel as a crime scene, Kracauer attempted to decode underlying social tendencies by looking at what seemed to be, at first sight, marginal cultural phenomena. 104 Rajesh Heynickx

As this essay will demonstrate, there can exist a rather comforting parallel between detective work and historical research. Both are meant to offer sollutions to ‘a mystery’ by collecting material evidence or recovering facts by interrogating (written) witnesses.7 Just as the detective novel is not just about the crime, but mostly focuses on the story of its detection, I will pay attention to how diverging texts and images can inform us about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century lobbies of grand hotels. Besides considering on what basis the lobby was a place where identities became (re)configured, I will provide a critical account of tracks that are useful for writing hotel history. More exactly, the following series of sources will be scrutinized: a postcard, two pictures and a painting. All of them contain specific narratives, telling us more about how the materiality and the illusionary image-building of the lobby collided, and, as we will see, they therefore enable us to canvas identity-related issues, such as gender, globalization, material culture and urban development. The trace of a lady Taxi tickets, a tourist guide, umbrellas, unregistered meetings and flakes of skin: hotels, a literary critic wrote in 2001, are containers of ‘traces leading up to other traces’.8 On the other hand, besides collecting traces, the hotel itself can be seen as a trace, or better: a disseminated trace. The Dutch writer Cees Noteboom, a notorious vistor of hotels, once noted that he could read ‘the poetry of all thoses sleeping places’ in his ‘useless collection of hotel letter paper’.9 Other examples of dispersed souvenirs of hotels are postcards, depicting the entire hotel building or, as often happened, placing the lobby at centre stage. Being bought, written on, stamped, addressed, sent, received, read, discarded, forgotten or remembered, those postcards presented, worldwide, the hotel’s self-image, and this from the end of the nineteenth century until the breakthrough of hotel websites in the middle of of the 1990s. A postcard of the lobby of the Parisian hotel Bergère, from 1923, shows us a lobby in the evening (fig. 6.2). Located in the very heart of Paris, between the Grand Boulevard and the Opera Garnier, people sit in lounge chairs and chat, read or write. Unmistakenly, this image is a product of secure impression management. The angle of the picture is well chosen. Packed between the glass-roofed ceiling and the mosaic floor, the Bergère lobby unfolds as a cosy living room. One person, a man writing behind a table, particularly draws the viewer’s attention. A spontaneous question pops up: (on) what is he writing? It is not unthinkable that he is writing a postcard with the Bergère lobby on its front. That would create an inkling of perspectives: the person who is writing writes on a card that portrays a lobby with a man writing on a card. Such production of an image within an image is a known literary and pictorial technique, called mise en abyme, commonly used to insert a narrative power into a 105 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

6.2 Postcard of the lobby space in the Hotel Bergère, Paris

scene by enabling the scene to create a dialogue with itself.10 Applied to the card, one could indeed say that a core element of the scene, the writing man, becomes an empowering narrative. He helps to illuminate the postcard’s framing story: in this lobby there reigns a comfortable and secure atmosphere. The effect of such a tactic cannot be underestimated. For the person receiving the card, the identification with the depicted lobby becomes much easier. She or he feels comfortable through the idea that the person who sent the card must have written the card exactly there, just as the man at the table, in a homelike environment. Postcards showing the lobby on their front not only presented an attractive image that charmed people, eventually seducing them to become future clients. On their back, in the form of brief notes, they also gave birth to a social history of those who visited the lobby. That happened through singular reflections such as, ‘This is where daddy stays when he is at work’, or the more standard, ‘A beautiful place. Many greetings to everyone’. With it offering such idiosyncratic vestiges, it is not so surprising that the deconstructivist Jacques Derrida used the postcard as a central metaphor in one of his attacks on the univocal character of history.11 Nonetheless, in the case of the card depicting the Parisian lobby, we are given, by its author – the American or English lady ‘Edith’ – accurate and telling information about her journey (fig. 6.3). The card even contains a glimpse of some family matters: Sorry I’m too sleepy to write a letter. Reached the Hotel Bergère this afternoon after a very pleasant trip. Got a note from aunt Mary at boat. Has not yet sold Mapledene and will be glad to see me. Uncle Will in good bodily health. Lovingly, Edith Of course, these few sentences, meant for a close relative and probably written in the lobby where she had bought the card, ask for 106 Rajesh Heynickx

6.3 Back of postcard of the lobby space in the Hotel Bergère, Paris

additional data. We want to be informed better about the trip and, most of all, are curious about Edith’s educational and social background. Was Mapledene the name of a big family estate or a favourite horse? Did she travel in a group? Was she staying in the Bergère to go the opera, just a few minutes away from the hotel? The answers to all these questions are hard, even impossible, to find. The only certain thing is that, after arriving in the French capital, Edith was sometimes craving for information about the milieu she had left. As for many other hotel guests writing home during the 1920s, the lobby, with its souvenir shop and postbox, functioned as a membrane between a native community and a new world being discovered as a tourist.12 Moreover, from 1900 on, the lobby could even turn into a hub for tourism and the mass transport this expanding industry was leaning on. The same nineteenth-century companies that built railways and stations constructed and owned hotels. In many of their lobbies, one could find timetables indicating the arrival and departure times of trains.13 And, in the 1950s, an American flight company such as Pan Am, trying to conquer the American interior market, opened new selling points in hotel lobbies. The lobby became a place of arrival and the starting point for a new journey, within a quite dense, often international network. Or, as the historian Paul Fussell sharply remarked in his study on British inter-war tourism: ‘tourism diminishes the world to the space of a hotel lobby and a picture postcard, and renders travel the exercise of running in place’.14 107 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

Through the intimate link that grew between the lobby, tourism and transport, Edith fully belonged to the age of speed, exhilaration and vertigo that pervaded Europe between 1900 and 1914.15 There was no time to write a letter. And, contrary to what the image on Edith’s postcard suggested, lobbies could hardly be identified with a comforting quietness. The constantly changing scene of an international lobby knew its own beat, produced by chatter, bells and muzak. There was a perpetual motion, a rhythmic chaos of people arriving and leaving the hotel. Still, despite this surrealistic jumble, order was installed and maintained in the lobby. For that, little white index cards, telephone switchboards and a small army of employees were responsible. The persons and luggage wafting into the hotel faced constraint. Men and women were filed. Suitcases, if not registered, were marked with a unique hotel sticker, the hotel’s emblematic trademark, when entering or leaving the building.16 The hotel was caught up in the ‘control revolution’,17 of which the lobby became the epicentre. Hotel notepaper, hotel stickers and hotel postcards: by carrying picturesque images and positive slogans, they broadcast an open, bright world, accessible to everyone. That was, of course, a myth. Even Edith, if we presume she was a well-to-do American, would have experienced a lesser freedom in some hotels in her home country than in the Bergère. In America, she could have met a century-old set of restrictions, sometimes resulting in exclusion, when entering the lobby. The reason? Being a woman. In the United States, the lobby was primarily a man’s world, and that had been so from the moment the American hotel industry, which was trendsetting for the niche of the grand hotels, started to grew explosively during the first three decades of the nineteenth century.18 That the lobby of American luxury hotels developed in its early days as a male preserve, and in some way continued so during the twentieth century, had to do with its initial function of an exchange building. In the lobbies of the 1820s and 1830s, men read local and foreign newspapers, tracked the price of stocks, absorbed political news and gossiped with friends. Being a gathering place for men, solidifying a new, middle-class, business elite, the lobby coincided with a male gaze to which women, according to the ruling etiquette, were not supposed to be exposed. They had to obey a strict code when entering public or semi-public places. Lowered, averted eyes were a sign of chastity. Only prostitutes – for whom hotels were indeed a favourite working terrain19 – were associated with a direct gaze, the willingness to offer sexual exchange.20 To avoid women encountering the male gaze, luxury hotels of the 1830s had separate family or women’s entrances. Besides that, the luxury hotel also installed a gender ideology of separate spheres through the creation of specialized rooms, such as a gentlemen’s parlour or a ladies’ drawing room. The boundaries were initially very strict and influential, for a long time the template for middle-class 108 Rajesh Heynickx

hotels. But, even more than in the form of a prescriptive planning of the architectural reality, the gender ideology seemed to persist in the minds of people. That explains why, sometime in the 1950s, feminist women journalists holding a convention in the Rice Hotel in Houston, Texas, wanting to be informed when there was a phone call for them, had to rebel against the hotel management, which told them it did not page women in the lobby. The management, as became clear, based its decision on the conviction that no decent woman would want her name to be announced in the hotel lobby.21 America had invented the luxury hotel, often proud to present it as the thermometer of a rich and unique civilization – ‘It is what the Forum perhaps was to Rome’, an enthusiast journalist exclaimed in 191922 – but it was more reluctant to admit that the grand hotel was also a barometer, revealing pressure tendencies and frontal boundaries in America’s social stratosphere. Kracauer’s take on the correspondence between space and a social reality seems to be proved here. Yet, Kracauer’s analysis – to a great extent a journalistic snapshot of the 1920s actuality – also invites us to think further: what happened over time, when one of the two intersecting poles of Kracauer’s ‘sober seeing’23 – the lobby’s material layout or its embedding social fabric – altered? A crime scene When (virtually) entering the Bergère today, a lot of things Edith saw in 1923 can still be distinguished (fig. 6.4). The glass roof and the mosaic floor did not disappear. Of course, with an integrated Wi-Fi network and a panoramic lift, the Parisian hotel has fully embraced the twenty-first century. Besides that, the visiting public has certainly become less exclusive than Edith’s social background must have been. Also, in the eight decades since Edith posted her card, the Bergère’s interior gained a more generic design, as it became part of an

6.4 Lobby space of the contemporary Hotel Bergère, Paris

109 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

6.5 Lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1904

international hotel chain. Although it strived for a more blanket look, the hotel management did not stop using footage of the lobby for publicity. Moreover, the photographic angle of today’s flashy website and the one used on the enigmatic postcard are identical. The face has changed, but it is still the same person. It seems to be, as an early hotel historian wrote: ‘a hotel’s lobby is what men’s features are to the physiognomist’.24 Where the physiognomist tries to assess a person’s character from his outer appearance, especially the face, the hotel’s complete ‘personality’ is announced in the lobby. That’s what hotel designers argued in the past and still do today.25 And most hotel visitors, indeed, do not easily forget peculiar traits of the lobby and often anchor their overall opinion of a hotel in the perception of these characteristics. It was exactly that line of thinking the product designer Philippe Starck cherished when he was told, in 2007, that the lobby he designed for the Royalton Hotel in New York City – an iconic landmark of 1990s hotel design – was dismantled after being absorbed by a new hotel group: ‘I am not sad for me. I am sad for the people who had memories of the hotel.’26

110 Rajesh Heynickx

6.6 The lobby of the Willard Hotel in decay

Judged as being passé and therefore demolished was one fate hotels could face from the late 1980s on. Another one was being forced to incorporate new technology, or being redesigned to line up with the profitable sameness of a hotel chain. Yet, besides the scenarios unfolding in the Bergère and the Royalton, there existed a third possibility. This plot began with the gradual dissolution in the late 1960s and could be followed, a couple of decades later, by a nostalgiadriven resurrection. That was what happened with the Willard Hotel, known as ‘America’s hotel’ (fig. 6.5), located in the heart of downtown Washington and of which the earliest structures go back to 1816. If one looks at a picture of the lobby taken in 1904, grandeur is the key word. The Doric columns – a cliché returning in many grand hotels – turn the lobby into a temple, almost epic in quality. From silk-covered easy chairs, doorknobs chiselled by hand and marble pavement, a triumphant splendour resounds.27 However, in a picture of the lobby taken in 1981, this palatial universe has collapsed into debris. What once was the place where you could find everybody who was anybody – a legend, promulgated by publicists for the hotel, wrongly holds that

111 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

the political term ‘lobbying’ originated here28 – became a dump yard and a shelter for homeless people. In 1986, the Willard Hotel was saved from the wrecking ball and got a top-to-bottom, long-lasting restoration. The lobby regained its grandeur and, besides being an exclusive reception area for diplomats, it now offered a stage to top musical ensembles from around the Washington Metro. Unmistakably, quite some detective work was required to bring the Willard back to its original state. Just the search in Europe for the right colour marble (more than twenty-five different types were used in the lobby) took a couple of months.29 Accurate restoration needing detailed research is one line of detective work in the Willard case; explaining why the hotel fell into decay can be another. Because a burning question emerges when looking at the picture with the fallen column: where did the erosive forces causing the hotel’s decline originate? One thing first: erosive power was not only detectable in the 1981 lobby (fig. 6.6). In fact, it had always been there, including in 1904. Or better: it was exactly the fight against disintegration that moulded the hotel into a temple. The choice to turn the lobby into a sort of secular sanctuary can be interpreted as a physical control over reality, an attempt to let substance and permanence prevail over transience. In what became known as the Gilded Age, an era of rapid economic and population growth during the late nineteenth century, the new American bourgeoisie – ambitious, but also anxious, owing to technological advances, increased immigration and the rapid urbanization of America – found stability in the form of Doric columns.30 The Willard functioned as a dream castle, installing a sort of aristocratic lineage through a material fraud with substitutes: as the rosewood was papier mâché, and the shimmering alabaster was nothing more than plaster, the columns were just steel beams wrapped up in classicist forms.31 The Potemkinian veil in the Willard’s lobby demonstrates that the Willard’s mechanical ingenuity underwent a ‘fossilization in rigid traditions’32 and, most of all, teaches that the building history of luxury hotels in general is double-sized. Besides the construction of performative high-rise buildings, the creation of a ‘Mytho-Logic’33 or counter-imaginary within modernity was also at stake. To launch an attractive illusion, modern technology was used without being exposed fully. The dream of the architect Joseph Lux, in 1909, about future hotel design being ‘a synthesis of hospitals, wagon-lifts and machinery’, and his prophecy, ‘Maybe in 50 years we will reach such excellent hotels’,34 are just parts of the story. Besides incarnating the desire to modernize in a linear way, the Willard lobby became the plaything of succeeding historical regimes: the retrograde forms chosen by identitycraving nineteenth-century builders became unfit (too expensive and old fashioned) for the mass tourism of the 1960s and only gained new, fresh attention when nostalgia spread as an ‘epidemic’ in the mid 1980s. From that moment on, the so-called ‘heritage industry’, of 112 Rajesh Heynickx

which the restored Willard definitely can be considered a factory plant, became a reality.35 Looking at the fallen capital and column on the 1981 picture as a corpus delicti, slaughtered by a remorseless cycle of historical regimes and their respective patterns of taste, it becomes clear that all the information needed to solve ‘the crime of the decay’ and to identify its ‘perpetrators’ cannot be found within the hotel walls. First, to get a grip on the deterioration of the Willard lobby that almost became fatal in 1981, it is useful to situate the crime scene, as we noticed, on a timeline. But also, second, the spatial perimeter of the crime scene must be broadened by fleshing out the surrounding urban environment. Carol Berens’s general statement, ‘Lobbies provide the backdrop for scenes of urban drama’, definitely applies to the Willard case.36 The ruination of the Willard went hand in hand with the fall of downtown Washington in the late 1960s. More specifically, the dramatic changes of the Willard were intimately linked with what happened on Pennsylvania Avenue, ‘America’s Main Street’, which joins the White House and the Capitol, and passes in front of the hotel. This urban artery had always provided the Willard lobby with a public. But, already by 1962, the Avenue had become, according to a report of a presidential committee, ‘a scene of desolation’.37 The entire neigbourhood of downtown Washington suffered, from that moment, an extended decline. With residents drawing away from the city’s centre, relying as they were on new means of transportation to live on the outskirts of the city, the Willard, and especially the lobby, was no longer a public area where a specific type of urban sociability, namely tourism and social meetings for the higher classes, could blossom. At that moment, the Willard stopped being a vital public arena with the lobby as an extension of the sidewalk. This correspondence between what happened in the lobby and what changed on Pennsylvania Avenue teaches us how much the hotel lobby, although it was of course gendered, directed by class-consciousness and racially or ethnically screened, formed part of a public sphere. Adolf Loos, impressed by a study trip to America, was therefore right when he declared in 1913 that what characterized the American hotel lobby the most was being an extension of the public street.38 The public sphere The lining up of a hotel’s (interior) history and an urban development can inform us about how new types of social interaction emerge or disappear in the public sphere.39 Therefore, it is not surprising at all to see that sociologists of the late 1970s, fascinated by the same urban sprawl that redefined the Willard, tried to design a theoretical grid by which they could get a grip on changes in those areas in social life where people did get together and freely discussed and identified societal problems. One of the most telling visions in this regard was initiated by the American sociologist Richard Sennett. At the moment 113 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

that the plaster encasements of the steel supports in the Willard lobby started to crack, in 1977, he published the influential The Fall of Public Man, defending the idea that public man no longer had a certain idea of his role in society and faced a tragic decrease in communication and social interaction. Looking at changes in the built environment from the eighteenth century to the 1970s, Sennett demonstrated that, from the start of the nineteenth century, the public domain stopped being a safe haven where private concerns were traded for a publicly oriented, cosmopolitan life – something he appreciated so much in the eighteenth-century coffee houses. According to Sennett, this evolution had not yet reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. It was in the period after the Second World War that cities’ public spheres had completely turned into clusters of places in which anonymous individuals assembled, without producing a public life with content. Social spaces where strangers could meet each other for short periods, even moments, such as city parks, cafes, theatres, opera houses and hotels, had killed public life after 1945: people had lost their social attention and interaction.40 The theoretician Marc Augé would take Sennett’s idea even further in 1995 by voicing the concern that it was not just the social fabric, but the very notion of place that had collapsed. He introduced the term ‘non-places’. Motorways, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket, all were places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as ‘places’.41 It does not need much imagination to connect Sennett’s idea of people being carriers of empty gestures or Augé’s reflections on spaces without history with the phenomenon of the lobby. People sitting in lounge chairs were indeed locked up in their own world, giving birth to a radical subjectivity and a thoroughgoing kind of rootlessness. Moreover, the lobby has to be situated at the point at which the conceptual flight lines of Sennett and Augé – the isolation of self from a community and the isolation from a continuum of tradition, respectively – cross. It is the deprivation of a shared present, people acting as a group, and the dissolution of a shared past, people connected through memories, that can make insightful the reason why the Willard slowly collapsed from 1965 onwards, the year that downtown Washington lost its corporate identity, and was restored in 1986, when a new, shared past, the heritage cult, gained firm ground. To understand how urban spaces such as the lobby acted as loci of alienation or how the visitors, the so-called ‘lobby lizzards’, acted as figures enclosed in their own poses cannot be done only on the basis of direct evidence such as a postcard, as in Edith’s case, or pictures of a site, as in the Willard case. Also, a broad panorama of popular media and artistic imagery has then to be scrutinized, because most people, although they have an idea of a luxury hotel, have never stayed in a grand hotel and have derived their 114 Rajesh Heynickx

6.7 Hotel Lobby, Edward Hopper, 1943

information from film, illustrated novels or magazines and television series. Many social and cultural values connected to the hotel were discursively constructed through imagery.42 That does not mean that hotel novels and hotel stickers are blessed with an essentialist core that reflects a well-defined identity. On the contrary, one has to look at the shifting patterns of identification. The 1904 picture was, in its own time, a token of pride, anchored in historicism. Eighty years later, it could become an orientation point for the restoration project, dreaming of a new future. To establish how the construction and allocation of identities related to the hotel lobby came into the world by (mis)using images would require very broad research. Still, if one wants a short illustration, the oeuvre of the American painter Edward Hopper would be no bad choice (fig. 6.7). Most of his paintings try to map the loneliness and the banality of everyday existence in public and semi-public or semi-deserted places where people gather: restaurants, cinemas, theatres and offices. The hotel is also a favourite theme. In the painting Hotel Lobby from 1943, for example, three nameless guests occupy an airless, disquieting space. The lack of rapport between figures is manifest. To accentuate that, the lobby functions as a stage set. The light comes, just like a spotlight during a play, from above and enlightens an elevated, strict architecture, marked by impotence, disconnection and hollowness. The equating of Hopper’s oeuvre with a representation of alienation became influential from the early 1980s on, the same period when the picture of the Willard ruin was taken, and it even turned into a standard topos in later analyses that used the interpretitive framework of Richard Sennett.43 Or, what was also an option, reflections about Hopper spontaneously coincided with the analysis made by sociologists. For example, when describing Hopper’s world, an American journalist covering a major Hopper exhibition in 2007 talked about a stressed society that he simply could not detest. It seemed to be too familiar to him: Everyone is lost in an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and bad dates. Everything has fallen tensely quiet. And this anxious, itchy mood haunts even the urban landscapes [. . .] in which the only person around is you, the viewer. Here every man is an island.44 In other words: this critic felt at home in a homeless world. An uncanny universe, evoked by Hopper but that had manifested itself in the lobbies where Edith relaxed and the Washington upper class socialized.

115 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Matthias, Bettina: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature: Checking in to Tell a Story, Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2006, p. 13. For a general view on the history and typology of these luxury hotels or palace hotels, see: Denby, Elaine: Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. An Architectural and Social History, London: Reaktion Books, 1998, pp. 33–45. For a definition of the wide range of hotel types, including middle-class hotels and rooming houses, one should consult: Groth, Paul: Living Downtown. The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 1–126. Adorno, Theodor: Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1999, pp. 38–9. The term heterotopia was coined by Foucault in the 1960s. For broad comments on this term and especially for a new, revealing translation of Foucault’s influential 1967 text, Of Other Spaces, see: Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (Eds.) Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 13–30. Kracauer, Siegfried: ‘The hotel lobby’ in: idem, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, Ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 183. Other, lesserknown texts on the hotel are: Kracauer, Siegfried: ‘At the luxury hotel’ [‘Im luxux hotel ’], Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September 1928; Kracauer, Siegfried: ‘Evening in the hotel’ [‘Abend in Hotel ’], Frankfurter Zeitung, 25 December 1928; Kracauer, Siegfried: ‘The Palace Hotel’ [‘Im Palast Hotel ’], Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September 1932. Kracauer, Siegfried: Strassen in Berlin und anderswo, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964, p. 70. The scholarly work on Kracauer is massive. Essential for getting a grip on Kracauer’s ideas on space are the following two articles: Fleischer, Molly: ‘The gaze of the flâneur in Siegfried Kracauer’s Das Ornament der Masse’, German Life and Letters, LIV/1, January 2001, pp. 10–24; Vidler, Anthony: ‘Agoraphobia: spatial estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer’, New German Critique, 54, 1991, pp. 31–45. O’Gorman, Ellen: ‘Detective fiction and historical narrative’, Greece and Rome, XLVI/1, April 1999, pp. 19–26. Of direct interest is also: Bloch, Ernst: ‘A philosophical view of the detective novel’, in: idem, The Utopian Function

116 Rajesh Heynickx

8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

of Art and Literature, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988, p. 244–64. Mol, Alex: ‘Kleine hotelarcheologie’, Raster, 96, 2001, p. 113. Nooteboom, Cees: Cees Nootebooms hotel, Antwerp, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Atlas, 2002, p. 33. Dällenbach, Lucien: Le récit spéculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977, pp. 76–83. According to Derrida, the postcard, which can be (mis)read by anyone, shows that there only exists a cavalcade of histories produced through a series of unpredictable circumstances. See, on that: Derrida, Jacques: The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. Bates, Charlotte: ‘Hotel histories: modern tourists, modern nomads and the culture of hotel-consciousness’, Literature and History, XII/2, 2003, pp. 69–71. Simmons, J.: ‘Railways, hotels and tourism in Great Britain, 1839–1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, XIX, 1984, pp. 201–22; Pope, Rex: ‘Railway companies and resort hotels between the wars’, The Journal of Transport Industry, 22, 2001, pp. 62–73. Fussell, Paul: ‘The stationary tourist’, Harper’s, April 1979, p. 32. The same analysis is made in: Urry, John and Chris Rojek: ‘Transformations of travel and theory’, in: idem (Eds.), Touring Cultures: Transformation of Travel and Theory, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 5–20. Blom, Philipp: The Vertigo Years. Change and the culture in the West, 1900–1914, London: Phoenix, 2009. A secure analysis of the hotel sticker is offered in the following catalogue: Bien, Helmut M. and Ulrich Giersch: Reisen in die große weite Welt. Die Kulturgeschichte des Hotels im Spiegel der Kofferaufkleber von 1900 bis 1960, Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1988, pp. 9–16. With this term, the sociologist James Beniger described in his seminal work, The Control Revolution. Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), the increasing measuring and registration of information between 1870 and 1920. This bureaucratic organization of knowledge deeply marked the hotel business, installing an industry of typewriters and card indexes that was not always that visible: Gordon, Ruth: ‘The forgotten industry’, Survey, XLIX, 1923, pp. 514–17. See also: Boomer, Lucius: ‘How we fitted Ford’s principles to our business’, System, XLIV/4, October 1923, p. 421.

18

19

20

21

22 23

24

25

26 27

28

29

For a telling study of this process, see: Wharton, Annabel: ‘Two Waldorf-Astorias: spatial economies as totem and fetish’, The Art Bulletin, LXXXV/3, September 2003, pp. 523–43. Sandoval-Strausz, A. K.: Hotel. An American History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 210–11. Brucken, Carolyne: ‘In the public eye: women and the American luxury hotel’, Winterthur Portfolio, XXXI/4, 1996, pp. 209–13. Interview by Mary Marshall Clark with the feminist journalist Eileen Shanahan (1924–2001) on 21 February 1992, for the Women in Journalism Oral History Project. The complete interview, stored in an online accessible database can be consulted at: www.wpcf.org/oralhistory/int3.html. Harrison, Rodes: ‘The hotel guest’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, May 1919, p. 754. That’s the way Adorno described the thinking of his friend and teacher Kracauer. Adorno, Theodor: ‘The curious realist: on Siegfried Kracauer’, in: Notes on Literature, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, vol. 2, p. 60. Frischauer, Willi: An Hotel is Like a Woman. The Grand Hotels of Europe, London: Leslie Frewin, 1965, p. 35. See the following examples from the last five decades: ‘A look at lobbies’, Architectural Forum, 104, January 1956, p. 122–9; Wright, L. and C. Amery: ‘Great indoors (Chicago’s indoor spaces)’, Architectural Record, 162, October 1977, p. 211–13; Riewoldt, Otto: New Hotel Design, New York: Watson Guptil Publications, 2002, p. 9. Bernstein, Fred A.: ‘In memoriam’, Interior Design, vol. 78, issue 11, 2007, pp. 232–6. On that, see: Grier, Katherine C.: ‘Hotels as model interiors’, in: idem, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors and Upholstery, 1850–1930, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 29–38. The story goes as follows: during the 1860s, President Ulysses S. Grant, often relaxing with a brandy and a cigar in the Willard lobby, became tired of those seeking influence to him there and referred scornfully to them as ‘lobbyists’. But the term did not originate in 1860s Washington; it was already used much earlier, in England’s Westminster, referring to the Member’s lobby. About the term, see: Zetter, Lionel: Lobbying. The Art of Political Persuasion, Hampshire: Harriman House, 2008, pp. 6–8. For example, see: Greer, Nora Richter: ‘Washington’s Grande Dame makes a comeback’, The AIA Journal, vol. 75, 1986, pp. 48–55; Carr, Richard Wallace and Marie Pinak Carr:

30

31

32

33

34

35

36 37

38

39

40 41

42

The Willard Hotel: An Illustrated History, Washington: Dicmar Pub, 1986. On this, see the essays collected in: Calhoun, Charles W. (Ed.): The Gilded Age. Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. For an inspiring reflection on this fake materiality of the grand hotel, see: Heine, Ernst W.: ‘Das Grandhotel’ in: idem, New York liegt im Neandertal: Bauten als Schicksal, Zurich: Diogenes, 1984, pp. 232–3. It was the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen who described the battle for cultural durability in this way: Gehlen, Arnold: Urmensch und Spätkultur. Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen, Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1956, p. 100; my translation. A term developed in: Murphy, Peter and David Roberts: Dialectic of Romanticism. A Critique of Modernism, London, New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 68–76. Lux, Joseph August: ‘Das Hotel ein Bauproblem’, Der Architekt, 15, 1909, p. 17. Lux is often cited by historians who write about the construction history of the hotel. Most of these references can be traced back to the influential study by Pevsner, who held an outspoken, linear view on architectural history; see: Pevsner, Nikolaus: A History of Building Types, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 177–91. Both the idea of an ‘epidemic nostalgia’ and the term ‘heritage industry’ were coined by the sociologist John Urry; see: Urry, John: The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage Pubications, 2002, p. 95. Berens, Carol: Hotel Bars and lobbies, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996 p. xv. Brodie, J. M.: ‘Transforming Pennsylvania Avenue from a very imperfect road to a grand Boulevard’, in: Federal Construction Council: Quality Planning in Times of Tight Budgets. Summary of a Symposium, Washington: National Academy Press, 1990, pp. 71–2. Loos, Adolf: ‘Hotel Friedrichstrasse in Wien, 1913/1914, (Notizen eines Hörers)’, in: Opel, Adolf (Ed.): Uber Architektur. Ausgewählte Schriften und Originaltexte, Vienna: Georg Prachner, 1995, p. 127. For a broad, but inspiring, look at the hotel as an urban space, see: McNeil, Donald: ‘The hotel and the city’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 32/3, 2008, p. 383–98. Sennett, Richard: The Fall of Public Man, New York: Vintage, 1977. Augé, Marc: Non-Lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris: Seuil, 1992, pp. 100–2. For some general ideas on that, see: Osborne, John and Michael Wintle: ‘The construction and

117 Illusion and reality at work in the lobby

allocation of identity through images and imagery: an introduction’, in: Michael Wintle (Ed.): Image into Identity. Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity, Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 15–30.

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43

44

Nochlin, Linda: ‘Edward Hopper and the imagery of alienation’, Art Journal, XLI/2, 1981, pp. 136–41. Cook, Greg: ‘Visions of isolation: Edward Hopper at the MFA’, Boston Phoenix, 4 May 2007, p. 22.

Case Studies

119 Case Studies

The Ritz, Paris Looking to eighteenth-century France through the lens of nineteenth-century historicism for a twentieth-century hotel lobby Mark Hinchman

1 Façade, Place Vendôme, built in 1688

A precocious Londoner, Arthur Joseph Davis (1878–1951), went to Paris to study architecture at the École des Beaux Arts at the age of sixteen.1 Within a few years of his arrival, he worked on a project, the Ritz Paris, that ushered in a new era of hotel design. The project also marked the beginning of his partnership with the French Alsatian architect, Charles Mewès (1858–1914). Davis studied with Godefroy before finding his place in Pascal’s atelier at the École. While he was a student, an established architect active in Paris, Charles Mewès, sought Davis’s assistance on a competition for the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Their entry took fourth place, but their collaboration marked the beginning of a successful architectural partnership. The resulting firm, Mewès and Davis, was active up to the eve of the Second World War and catered for an impressive and international roster of clients. One of the first was César Ritz, who asked Mewès to help him fashion a hotel from multiple adjacent properties on the prominent site of one of Paris’s grand public spaces, the Place Vendôme. Hence, the Ritz Hotel was carved out of existing buildings. Jules Hardouin Mansart initially designed the urban space and the façades of the Place, which 120 Mark Hinchman

2 (top left) Entry, Ritz Paris, 1900 3 (bottom left) View onto garden, Ritz Paris, 1900 4 (right) Ground floor circulation, Ritz Paris, 1900

dates back to 1688. The site is resolutely urban where it meets the Place, and yet a garden provides greenery at the rear of the property. Ritz’s charge to Mewès and his young assistant was to remodel the site into a first-class hotel. The collaboration of the Swiss hotelier, his chef, Auguste Escoffier, and his architect has taken on apocryphal proportions.2 The plan of the Ritz Paris relies on an L-shape circulation as its spine, with the short leg of the L constituting the façade on the Place Vendôme, and the longer leg extending backwards, towards the rear of the building. From this horizontal circulation, grand spaces, interior and exterior, extend on both sides. The circulation space itself is generous, classically detailed and furnished so that it functions as part of the suite of opulent public spaces. The lobby of the Ritz Paris is not a single room, but a space that flows from room to room. At multiple locations, what separates one room from another is a level change, indicated by two stairs and further delineated with a pair of columns. The firm used this composite feature repeatedly in their projects. 121 The Ritz, Paris

5 Entry hall, Ritz Paris, 1900 6 Stairway and reception, Ritz Paris, 1900

As famous as the lobby is the fact that diners at Escoffier’s restaurant ordered their meals à la carte. In their plans, Mewès and Davis employed circles and ovals in two ways. One was as a central distribution point, the node from which axes radiated. Another was hierarchically to emphasize the most important rooms, such as L’Espadon Restaurant. The hotel’s other innovation was that the lobby’s restrained classicism signified that this was the sort of establishment with en suite bath and dressing rooms. The Ritz lobby is mostly made of plaster, with stone decorative work and carpeted floors. The careful attention to the plasterwork, painting and gilding made a cohesive project out of what was essentially painted plaster with a judicious use of expensive materials.3 The rooms were completed with reproduction Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture painted to match the walls, in pale yellow, gray, or pink. For all its influence, the Ritz Paris is a surprisingly small hotel, with a big influence. The hotels that followed it were larger, but with the Ritz Paris, all the essential architectural elements that the firm relied on for decades were in place. An article written in 1947 explored at length the impact of the Ritz Paris on twentieth-century hotel design: “this small but exclusive hotel soon became the model for all subsequent buildings of its type.”4 Most observers commented on the architectural precision of the designs of Mewès and Davis, an effect achieved through the on-hands efforts of both partners. In the tradition of the beaux arts, they created watercolor washes; when construction was underway, the architects resolved many details with full-scale drawings.5 It is interesting that the eminent architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner describes two of their later London projects as “urbane Italian Renaissance manner that derived from the American firm Mead, McKim, & White” (sic).6 Alastair Service, who writes approvingly of the firm’s work, states that “they did produce a lot of the most elegant and visually enriching street architecture of London and other cities, as well as some joyous interiors.” The Ritz lobby represents a strand of twentieth-century design that is antithetical to modernism. Mewès and Davis were fully aware of these innovations and pointedly ignored them. Decades after the debut of the Ritz, when Davis enjoyed an eminent position in London’s architectural community, one Lord Clonmore explicitly criticized, in print, the hospitality work of the firm. The subject was ocean-liner interiors, a sector of design work the firm excelled in, largely owing to the success of the Ritz hotels. Davis was considered an expert on the subject and had previously written about the same topic.7 Clonmore wrote: The modern vessel is a lovely thing. But go inside one of our “luxury ships”, get over the excitement of traveling, of that particular thrill when the train first reaches the docks, and wander 122 Mark Hinchman

carefully through its “social halls” and “winter gardens”. You will be very depressed. If not, you have the kind of taste which admires the new London hotels.8 7 Lobby and stair, Ritz Madrid, 1910 8 Façade bay, Ritz London, Piccadilly, 1903

A characteristic of ocean liners and hotels alike is that their reputation derives as much from their guests as their interiors and furnishings. No hotel in the world has a roster of former guests to rival that of the Ritz Paris. The list of twentieth-century visitors includes Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Hutton, Randolph Churchill, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Richard Nixon.9 The twenty-first-century list includes luminaries from David Beckham to Mark Wahlberg. But no doubt the most famous guest whose history is linked to the Paris hotel was Diana, Princess of Wales, who was dating the owner’s son Dodi Al-Fayed, and whose final moments a security video caught as she exited through a revolving door, moments before her death: an incursion of popular culture into an environment designed to high academic standards.10 The success of the Ritz Paris led César Ritz to hire Mewès and Davis to remodel the Carlton Hotel (1901) in London, which in turn led to a new, ground-up hotel, the Ritz Piccadilly (1903), all of which are further elaborations on the Ritz design schema. The English hotels were followed in turn by hotels in Spain, the Ritz Madrid (1910) and the Hotel Maria Christina (1912) in San Sebastian, and ocean-liner interiors for Germany’s Hamburg–America Line and Britain’s Cunard. The design elements so successfully put into play at the Ritz Paris, 1900, came to constitute what the public expected of a first-class hotel. Subsequent hotels by the firm and their imitators employed a similar design approach. A phrase that dismissively describes their design schema as “tous les Louis” contains a kernel of truth: behind baroque façades, Mewès and Davis cleverly inserted eighteenth-century French classical interiors for a commercial venture that an enthusiastic twentieth-century public embraced. 123 The Ritz, Paris

9 Lobby, Hotel Maria Christina, San Sebastian, 1912

10 Section and floor plan, Ritz Paris

scale 1:500

0 0

The Ritz Paris

124 Mark Hinchman

5 1

10 2

3

15 ft 4

5 m

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

Obituary, “Arthur Davis,” The Times, July 23, 1951. About Davis’s years in Paris, Alastair Service writes: “The start of his career is something of a fairy story come true.” Service, Alastair et al.: Edwardian Architecture and Its Origins, London: Architectural Press, 1975, p. 435. Their requirements for plasterwork and painting are delineated in detail in the specifications for the Royal Automobile Club. Mewès and Davis: Specification of Works Required to be Done and Materials to be Used in the Erection and Completion of New Club Premises Pall Mall, s.w. for the Directors of the Royal Automobile Club Buildings Company Limited (London: Mewès & Davis and E. Keynes Purchase, September 1909. MeC/1–2). ‘The creator of the modern luxury hotel: Charles Mewès, Architect, 1860–1914’, RIBA Journal, October 1947: p. 604. Reilly, C. H.: “Eminent living architects and their

6

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8

9 10

work: Arthur J. Davis, FRIBA,” Building, April 1929, p. 158. Bradley, Simon and Pevsner, Nikolaus: London I: The City of London, Buildings of England series, London: Penguin, 1997, p. 123. Davis wrote two articles on the topic. Davis, Arthur: ‘The Architecture of the Liner: Planning, Decoration and Equipment’, The Architectural Review, 35, April 1914: p. 89; and ‘The Decoration of Ocean Liners’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1922: p. 230. Lord Clonmore: ‘The architecture of the liner’, The Architectural Review, LXX, July–December 1931: p. 62. Boxer, Mark (Ed.): The Paris Ritz, London: Thames and Hudson, 1991, p. 12. Mohamed Al-Fayed is the current owner and was responsible for a thorough renovation of the hotel that was in keeping with the design direction established by Mewès and Davis.

Sources ‘The creator of the modern luxury hotel: Charles Mewès, Architect, 1860–1914’, RIBA Journal, October 1947: 603–4. Binney, M.: The Ritz Hotel, London, Foreword by the Prince of Wales, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Boxer, M. (Ed.): The Paris Ritz, Introduction by Pierre Salinger, London: Thames & Hudson, 1991. Bradley, S. and Pevsner, N.: London I: The City of London, The Buildings of England Series, London: Penguin, 1997.

125 The Ritz, Paris

Montgomery-Massingberd, H. and Watkin, D.: The London Ritz: A Social and Architectural History, London: Aurum, 1989. Reilly, C. H.: ‘Eminent living architects and their work: Arthur J. Davis’, FRIBA, Building, April 1929: 153–9. Service, A. et al.: Edwardian Architecture and Its Origins, London: Architectural Press, 1975.

Strand Palace Hotel, London Lyanne Holcombe

1 Reception area and front desk

Described as jazz-modern, a style from which art deco evolved in the early 1920s, the lobby at the Strand Palace Hotel, with its stainlesssteel revolving doors and panels subdivided into angular patterns, illuminated the façade and entrance to a luxurious interior. Dividing inside and outside by way of the threshold, the revolving doors – set quite a long way back from the pavement – were flanked by a glass balustrade sweeping up in stages, thus providing a graduated effect of light that was spectacular and inviting for the hotel guest. Marking a popular departure for the designs of modern commercial enterprises preceded by the French art nouveau, this was a transitional style that had evolved in its place. Embracing metal such as nickel-plated chromium, aluminium and steel, the 1920s philosophy and aspirations of the new machine age were to be realised in the specific roles that illumination and design were to play in a modern interior. Location, façade and faience Situated in the fashionable, yet marketable, area of the Strand in central London, the Strand Palace Hotel was constructed in 1909 by the Strand Hotel Company – a limited enterprise established by the firm J. Lyons and Co. to expand upon their business of teashops and 126 Lyanne Holcombe

2 Façade of Strand Palace Hotel, ca. 1955 3 View from the lobby towards the reception

large restaurants. The space and layout of this particular site evoked architectural tradition within a hypothesis of Edwardian urban renewal. As buildings could be erased swiftly by demolition in the commercial West End shopping district, the previous Exeter Hall was to be replaced by a new hotel that would attract the existing middle-class patronage acquired by the cafe bar and restaurant. While other suitably equipped hotels existed in London for the grand tourist, namely, Claridge’s (1812), the Savoy (1889) and the Ritz (1906), the Strand Palace would adopt a façade that would simultaneously represent social aspiration and economic value in the truth of the materials used for its exterior and interior make-up, a gesture to attract the small-scale traveller and overseas visitor. This, in turn, had helped Lyons to develop a Roman classical house style in building a whole exterior faced with white faience; Doulton’s Carrara-ware (glazed terracotta) was a decision attributed to the hotel architects, William J. Ancell and Frederick J. Wills. A popular medium used for the cladding of large city buildings and some factories and public houses since 1900 in Britain, such a standardised facing would reach its peak in popularity in the 1930s, as it was an ideal medium for polychrome art deco design that appealed to designers who were reaching out to the masses. Wall decoration, lights and doors The British architect and interior and set designer Oliver P. Bernard is known for his redesign of the original interior at the Strand Palace Hotel, and particularly the hotel lobby, in 1929–30.1 Perceived by a few contemporaries as a vigorous example of a positive style, the Strand Palace entrance became Bernard’s most renowned commission.2 Previously employed as principal scenic artist for Klaw and Erlanger in New York, Bernard began to develop an understanding for technical lighting. Engaged as technical director for the Grand Opera Syndicate, in Covent Garden and the British National Opera Company, by 1924 Bernard was engaged as the consultant artistic and technical director for government participation in the British Empire Exhibition and, 127 Strand Palace Hotel, London

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further, supervised interior decoration of the government pavilion at Wembley. Important for his career as an interior and lighting designer was a position he attained as consultant artistic and technical director for government participation in the International Exposition of Industrial Art, Paris, in 1925. Designed by Bernard, the interior architecture at the Strand Palace encompassed various purposes. Domestic materials such as Empire timbers and mellow plasterwork were used for private residential areas such as the lounge or drawing room – set apart from the more frequented parts of the building, albeit providing a private and restful environment – whereas, in the main lobby, sheets of marble scaled 128 Lyanne Holcombe

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most of the wall, clad in some part by archways of mirrors and extensive angular ceiling lights. Doors would recall memories of those who sought a reflection in their polished mirrored glass, as the styling was reminiscent of the same luxury one might find at the cinema. As art deco had become synonymous with the Paris exposition and its uses had been applied to commercial outlets in Europe, Great Britain and the United States, hotels were designed as an ideal for recreation and encounter in a public setting. Electricity and technical expertise were paramount in the acceptance of these interiors as a new and modern phenomenon for people who were only just accepting minor examples of such developments through domestic appliances and interior fittings encountered in the home. Experiential space and layout With a modern experience on offer, the services and amenities within the hotel, which were founded on the lobby itself, directed the public through a vortex of amusement and leisure. Although this was the architecture of commerce, the layout of the building indicates how the lobby is a singular space – either for waiting, passing time, meeting or even performing. Owing to the anonymity of the hotel experience, it is at once familiar and unfamiliar, each angle permitting a threshold and a new space or encounter that was mostly designated for luxury shopping or dining. With an eye for designing spectacular sets, in his career, Bernard had worked with modern retail spaces by utilising the new techniques in lighting, and it was clear that the designer was in the process of providing experiences present within the notion of Americanised luxury. The hotel lobby encountered predominantly through the revolving door at the Strand Palace Hotel had, at once, emphasised its architectural and technical strength; determining the flow of public traffic from one perspective and closing it from another, the entrance founded on the lobby itself structured the public space between interior and exterior into a series of threshold elements that would reinforce the freedom of modernism as part of the democratisation of the leisure industry. Notes 1

Stephen, Brindle: English Heritage Report, London Division, 25 October 1990.

2

Richards, J. M.: ‘A brace of original hotels’, The Listener, vol. 82, no. 2111, 11 September 1969.

Sources ‘Wall decoration, lights and doors: a photograph and detail drawings from the Strand Palace Hotel resident’s lounge’, Architect’s Journal, 1 April 1931. Brindle, S.: English Heritage Report, London Division, 25 October 1990. Duncan, A.: ‘Art deco lighting’, Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Spring, vol. 1, 1986.

Richards, J. M.: ‘A brace of original hotels’, The Listener, vol. 82, no. 2111, 11 September 1969. Stalder, L.: ‘Turning architecture inside out: revolving doors and other threshold devices’, Journal of Design History, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009.

129 Strand Palace Hotel, London

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo Greg Votolato

1 View of entrance part of lobby and reception desk

In the mythology of twentieth-century architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Imperial Hotel holds a special place. The Imperial’s formal grandeur and its exotic synthesis of historical, modern and cross-cultural ornamental styles presented an instantly recognisable image, while the building’s innovative engineering made it the subject for one of the best-known dramas in modern architectural history. In 1913, a committee of investors, including representatives of the Japanese Imperial Household, set out to recruit an architect for a new hotel to replace the original Imperial Hotel building, a wooden structure built in 1890 near to the grounds of the Imperial Palace and Residence in central Tokyo. Their search eventually led them to the German Ernst Wasmuth’s 1910–11 publication of Wright’s early work 130 Greg Votolato

2 View from lobby towards entrance doors 3 Postcard of entrance of Imperial Hotel, 1925

in two volumes. The Wasmuth Portfolio, containing over 100 lithographs, caught their attention owing in part to the obvious influence of Japanese prints (Wright collected and conducted a lucrative trade in Japanese woodblock prints) on the style of those renderings, many executed by Marion Mahony Griffin, and by the formal qualities of his early buildings that reflected his admiration for, and knowledge of, traditional Japanese architecture. Wright referred to the committee’s impression that his buildings were, ‘not Japanese, not at all, but will look well in Japan’, a typical effort to deny any direct historical references in his work.1 At the time, Wright’s career and personal life were blighted and tumultuous, and so he diligently sought and won the commission, which offered him an opportunity to live and work abroad in a country he loved. Wright began work on the design in 1915 and set up a Tokyo office to oversee the building’s construction, which was completed in 1922. During those years, the architect also built several houses and a school in Japan. Meanwhile, he and his son, Lloyd Wright, established an office in Los Angeles, where his most significant buildings of the 1920s were commissioned. This reorientation from the Chicago area to the Pacific Rim and the American south-west was accompanied by a growing interest in Mayan architecture, particularly in its massing and ornament, an influence that found its way into many of his California buildings of the period and into the Imperial Hotel. Wright’s long-standing interest in Japanese art and aesthetics had influenced the design of many of his earlier prairie houses, such as the Willits house (1902) and the Martin house (1904), and other projects, including the Midway Gardens of 1914, buildings that provided models

131 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

4 Travellers’ brochure of Imperial Hotel, 1930s

for the Imperial. The cross-axial symmetry of their plans, their hierarchical massing, the emphasis on three-dimensionality created by stone coping bands and projecting cantilevers, abstract piercing of walls and strong recessional qualities of deeply shaded verandas all became significant elements in the design of the new hotel. The Imperial’s rectangular urban site may have challenged Wright’s determination to engage his buildings with nature, but this was a familiar challenge for him. To accomplish this aim in downtown Tokyo, he applied ideas developed in designs for suburban Chicago buildings, such as the Coonley house (1908) and the unbuilt McCormick house (1907), where large reflecting pools and densely planted courtyards aimed to implant the inspirational qualities of the natural world in the heart of the building complex. Nature, however, also had potentially lethal consequences for buildings in Tokyo, located in one of the Pacific’s major earthquake zones. Wright intended the Imperial to be the world’s most resilient modern building in response to the shocks generated by seismic activity. Therefore, while immersing himself in the study of geology, the architect enlisted the engineer Paul Mueller, who, like Wright, had worked for the firm of Adler and Sullivan in his earlier days, to solve the problem of an earthquake-proof, steel-reinforced concrete building. Together, they decided on a flexible, lightweight structure of bricks and the local lava stone, oya, a porous material that could be hand-carved like oak, laid on a series of slab foundations floated upon the muddy soil of the site, and anchored to them by short, tapered pins. Flexible separation joints connected these platforms at intervals of 60 feet (20 metres). Columns springing from the centre of each foundation slab carried the cantilevered upper floors, thus avoiding the collapse frequently resulting from independent movement of walls that support internal floor slabs at their edges in conventional modern structures. Whereas the broad, sloping roofs of traditional Japanese buildings were covered with heavy ceramic tiles that often slid off the building, 132 Greg Votolato

5 Seating areas within lobby, 1930s

with lethal results, in even light tremors, the Imperial’s roofs were covered in light, hammered-copper sheet tiles that stayed put when earthquakes struck. All electrical wiring and piping for plumbing were of flexible lead or copper and ran in ducts, independent of the main structure of the building, to avoid the catastrophic breakages that occurred in other Western-style buildings during Tokyo quakes. A large reflecting pool in the entrance courtyard provided an elegant architectural feature, but also served as an independent source of water in the event of fire, which was often the final consequence of an earthquake. Then, with theatrical timing that history rarely offers, on 1 September 1923 the new building survived the Great Kanto earthquake, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama, killing over 100,000 people owing to the initial shocks, tsunamis along the coast and fire-storms that followed the tremors in all populated areas of the Kanto region. After several days, during which communication between Tokyo and the outside world was cut, a telegram came to Wright from Baron Okura, who had commissioned the building. Famously, it read: ‘hotel stands undamaged as a monument to your genius.’2 This assessment was substantially correct, as the building provided a safe refuge from the wholesale devastation around it. Yet the Imperial was damaged, to the extent that several pieces of decorative stonework did crumble and fall, and its floating concreteslab foundations had settled and deformed, leaving floor surfaces permanently uneven. Nevertheless, for the next forty-five years, Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel was the city’s premier venue for foreign visitors and for top social events. During the US military occupation of Japan following the Second World War, the hotel was the favourite billet for American top brass, and, in the 1950s, international celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio stayed there. But, by the 1960s, it was becoming shabby. Its bedrooms were considered too small by modern international standards and they were not air-conditioned, and the owners, by then a corporation independent of the Imperial Household, wanted to maximise the earning potential of the prime Tokyo site. Finally, in 1968, the façade and entrance lobby were carefully dismantled, while the rest of the complex was demolished to make way for the present modern, high-rise hotel of the same name. The preserved sections of the building were re-erected around a reconstruction of the original reflecting pool in the grounds of the Meiji Mura Museum, near Nagoya. Of all the world’s purpose-built ‘palace’ hotels, Wright’s Imperial can potentially lay the greatest claim to being authentically regal, owing to its commission by the Japanese Imperial Household and its proximity to an actual imperial palace. It was a significant and original work, and, after ninety years, the soap opera surrounding the Imperial’s genesis and Wright’s dramatic hype around its survival continue to fascinate, repel and amuse those who come to know it. 133 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

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Furthermore, despite critical reservations about its elaborate baroque styling, the appropriateness of its Mayan ornamentation, and its imperfect foundations, the Imperial Hotel remains unique in the history of a building type.

Notes 1 2

Sources

Wright, Frank Lloyd (Ed. Edgar Kaufman): An American Architecture, New York, 1955, p. 149. Wright, Frank Lloyd (Ed. Edgar Kaufman): Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings, New York, 1960, p. 205.

Hitchcock, H.-R.: Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1971. James, C.: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, New York, 1989. Meech, J.: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect’s Other Passion, New York, 2001. Wright, F. L.: An American Architecture, New York, 1955. Wright, F. L. (Eds. Edgar Kaufman and Ben Raeburn): Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings, New York, 1960.

135 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

Grand Hotel Gooiland, 1936 Tom Avermaete

1 View of reception desk

In 1934, the famous Dutch architect Johannes Duiker was commissioned to design the Grand Hotel Gooiland: a hotel and theatre building at the southern edge of the town of Hilversum in the Netherlands. The elite who, in the 1920s, had moved out of the city of Amsterdam towards Hilversum missed the culture and nightlife of the grand city and wanted to reinstall this with Gooiland. The architect’s sudden death the year after the commission left the project at a schematic design stage. The development of the design was in the hands of P. Elling and G. W. Tuynman, under the supervision of Bernard Bijvoet, with whom Duiker had shared a practice for more than ten years. The Grand Hotel was largely designed according to the functionalist principles that had been so central in the entire career of Duiker. The general compositional principle is clear: articulated volumes with the main functions, clad in ivory-coloured ceramic, rest on a half-basement, which follows the contours of the plot and houses the technical plant. For the main structure, a steel skeleton was chosen that allowed for an economical way of building, but especially introduced a wide variety of spatial possibilities. Indeed, with the steel skeleton, it was possible to create a broad spectrum of enclosed spaces, but it also offered the possibility to introduce spatial features such as floors, mezzanines and bridges that would interconnect the different spaces. 136 Tom Avermaete

2 Entrance of the Hotel Gooiland from the street, 1936 3 View of the cafe, lounge and restaurant areas from the lobby, 1936

The main composition of the building can be described as three rectilinear volumes (holding the different guest-rooms) that create a U-shape, which opens on Emmastraat, with a little square in front of the building. In between these different volumes are located the collective functions of the hotel: the lobby, restaurant and bar on the raised entrance floor and a large sun terrace for hotel guests on the first level. The U-shape facing towards the city can be looked upon as a symbolic duplication of the theatre at the back of the building, so that the terrace for the hotel guests reads as an open-air stage that acts as a counterpoint for the Grand Theatre. However, together with the collective functions that are located in the centre of the U-composition, the entire hotel takes the form of a grand public lobby. Indeed, a closer look at the hotel reveals how it encompasses a variety of elements that mediate, in various ways, between public and private spheres. The first element comprises the separate entrances for the different programmatic elements that compose the Grand Hotel Gooiland. These entrances are reached by stairs that lead to a porticoed space, which functions as a first filter towards the public space of street and square. During the summer season, the porticio would also function as a terrace, with tables for cafe and restaurant. The strong circular columns that support the terrace on the first level demarcate the porticio and offer it a static monumentality, which – as Maristella Casciato has noticed – contrasts with the fluidity achieved by Duiker in the sequence of spaces both parallel and perpendicular to the street. Two of the eight columns are pulled back from the edge of the terrace to demarcate the main stairs for entering the hotel. The columns are also articulated differently: their tops are flared and make, as such, reference to the capitals of antique columns. Two curvilinear, glazed walls accompany the visitor to the entrance doors: on the left is the Grand Cafe (which includes a stage for a small orchestra, billiard room 137 Grand Hotel Gooiland, Hilversum

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and buffet), and on the right is the spacious reception hall of the hotel, with its restaurant. Both Grand Cafe and hotel hall are articulated as double-height spaces with mezzanines and have a complex character of interlocking spatial entities. The administrative offices and the large kitchen, as well as the Grand Theatre – largely designed by Bijvoet and opened simultaneously with the hotel – are tucked behind these spaces. The main feature of the hotel hall is the semicircular reception desk. In the Grand Cafe, the different mezzanines and the stage catch the eye upon entering. The spaces are very soberly decorated, with natural finished wood, clear hues and white tiles as the main elements. Only the reception hall of the hotel was given a wall covering, up to a certain height, originally of stained-red-leather panels. From the reception hall, the hotel guest continues his route towards the big, collective terrace on the first floor. This space for informal gathering and relaxation is simultaneously in contact with the guest-rooms and with the city. It is the last stage of an elaborate trajectory between the public space of the street and the intimacy of the hotel room. Although the Grand Hotel Gooiland has been expanded and rebuilt several times over the years – the first time as early as 1939, when the spatial character of the cafe was drastically altered – the building stands today as a fascinating illustration of the mediation between private and public, between the individual and the collective spheres. It is this capacity to articulate a variety of definitions of public and private through sheer architectural means that has turned the Grand Hotel Gooiland into one of the exemplary public buildings of twentieth-century architecture. As a critic on the occasion of the inauguration in 1936 claimed: The Grand Hotel Gooiland is an edifice of the highest order, who’s construction and furnishing have been entrusted to architects and technicians able to profit from the newest developments offered by art and technology. In some ways it has not been an enterprise without risk: it has been a challenge. But let us say immediately that it has succeeded wonderfully. Indeed, the Grand Hotel Gooiland has effectively become a precedent. Sources Casciato, M.: ‘Jan Duiker’s Grand Hotel Gooiland’, Daidalos, no. 62, 1996: 26–35. Molema, J.: Ir. J. Duiker, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1989.

139 Grand Hotel Gooiland, Hilversum

Hotel Le Corbusier The extended lobby, the resident as guest and the Unité d’Habitation as hotel Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier – ATBAT, Marseille, 1947–52 Nick Leech

1 Perspective of Unité d’Habitation Marseille, 1953

The Unité d’Habitation was designed as a self-contained, self-sufficient community, and, for Le Corbusier, it was nothing less than an ideal architectural and urban form into which all of his research and principles about modern life, housing and urbanism had been distilled. Three precedents in particular influenced the design: the monastery, with its seclusion, privacy and sharp distinction between the life of the individual and that of the collective;1 the Phalanstère,2 an ideal building-type dreamed up by the nineteenth-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier; and the ocean liner.3 For Le Corbusier, the Unité would provide a hotel-like experience where residents would effectively become guests in their own homes. 140 Nick Leech

2 Swimming pool and nursery on rooftop of Unité d’Habitation Marseille, 1953

To achieve the desired level of self-containment in the Unité, Le Corbusier included every facility deemed necessary for daily life. As well as 337 apartments, the roof housed a kindergarten, nursery, paddling pool, gymnasium and running track. A shopping centre was arranged along elevated ‘interior streets’ on the seventh and eighth floors, as was a restaurant, snack bar and hotel. For Le Corbusier, the notion of self-sufficiency was not only central to his concept for the building, it provided the key to successful communal life. Le Corbusier had started to conceive of the communal housing unit as a hotel long before the design of the Unité. The entrance to his 1922 immeuble–villas concept was hotel-like spatially and, in terms of its operations: ‘The usual cramped building entrance with their inevitable concierge’s room is replaced by a large hall. Doormen on day and night duty admit visitors and show them to the elevators.’4 Thirty years later, Le Corbusier delivered on his earlier plan, creating a lobbylike entrance that retained the materials, finishes, features and functions more associated with elite affluence than mass housing. These included an elaborate porte cochère, large plate-glass entrance doors, stained-glass feature walls, feature lighting, highly polished travertine floors and a concierge’s desk. The location of the hotel reception and accommodation on the same floors as residential apartments reinforced the elision of the home and the hotel. Guests and residents would also share entrances, elevators, cafes, restaurants 141 Hotel Le Corbusier, Marseille

3 Hotel at Unité d’Habitation Marseille, 1953 4 Interior street at Unité d’Habitation Marseille, 1953

5 Outdoor lobby of Unité d’Habitation Marseille, 1953

and shops. One of the main spatial effects was the creation of a transitional space imbued with all of the liminal, anonymous qualities of the hotel lobby, which now extended all the way from the building’s entrance to the threshold of each private apartment.5 It also served to accentuate the distinction between public spaces and private residences, or ‘cells’ as Le Corbusier called them, in a linguistic hangover from his monastic precedent.6 At the Unité, roofs became playgrounds, and corridors became streets in the sky. Le Corbusier had created a building that challenged accepted distinctions between the public and private, individual and collective, resident and guest. As Carsten Krohn has discussed,7 the Unité has always aroused strong architectural and critical passions, and this may have something to do with its subsequent influence on a whole generation of architects, and those engaged in the design of social housing in particular. In the UK alone, the Unité had a direct influence on the London County Council’s Alton West estate, Roehampton (1958), Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s Park Hill estate in Sheffield (1961) and Chamberlain, Powell & Bon’s Barbican Estate in London (completed 1982).8 Architectural historians are just as divided in their opinions. Critics have tended to focus on Le Corbusier’s unapologetic utopianism and on the building’s operations. For Peter Serenyi, the influence of the hotel metaphor on the final design was far too literal: It seems to me that, ideally at least, each apartment . . . is designed for a single human being, living completely alone, while sharing the advantages of a larger collective order. Each . . . must be understood as a bachelor’s quarter and the whole building as a . . . hostel.9

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Conversely, Unité’ admirers see the building as nothing less than evidence of Le Corbusier’s towering genius. In Le Corbusier: Ideals and Forms, W. J. R. Curtis is particularly lyrical in his appreciation: The textured oblong broods like an Antique viaduct above the trees, its bold mass and mighty legs evoking the great wall behind the Roman theatre at Orange. In the tawdry imitations skill, philosophy and poetry are absent. The Unité takes a patiently worked out urban theorem and renders it in the terminology of a Mediterranean dream.10

Notes 1

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See Le Corbusier’s 10 October 1929 lecture, ‘A dwelling at human scale’, quoted in: Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 87–8. See Serenyi, Peter: ‘Le Corbusier, Fourier and the Monastery of Ema’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 49, no. 4, December 1967, for a detailed discussion of their influence. Le Corbusier had personal experience of the style of life and luxuries offered by the modern liner, and his books and lectures repeatedly cited them as object lessons in the rational allocation of services and space. See Stanislaus von Moos’s discussion of the ‘nautical metaphor’ in Le Corbusier’s work in: Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979. Le Corbusier: Vers une Architecture, Paris: Editions Artaud, 1977, p. 208, quoted in Guiton, Margaret: The Ideas of Le Corbusier on Architecture and Urban Planning, New York: George Braziller, 1981, p. 90. For the criticism of this and Le Corbusier’s response, see Alfred Roth’s comments and

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Le Corbusier’s response in Janson, A. and C. Krohn: Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation, Marseilles, Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2007, p. 9. Le Corbusier described the effect of entering each apartment: ‘You will then be alone, you will meet no one, you will be in peace, sunlight and space, and the green world outside will stream through your windows’, Le Corbusier Œuvre Complète: 1946–1952, vol. 5, Basel: Birkhäuser Publishers, 1960, p.95, quoted in Serenyi, 1967, p. 286. See Krohn, Carsten: ‘A building that is a town. About the impact made by the Unité d’Habitation’, in Janson, A. and C. Krohn, 2007, pp. 7–18. For contemporary British responses, see Murray and Osley (Eds.): Le Corbusier and Britain: An Anthology, London: Routledge, 2008. Peter Serenyi, 1967, p.286. Curtis, W. J. R.: ‘The modulor, Marseilles and the Mediterranean myth’, p.174, in Curtis, W. J. R.: Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, Oxford: Phaidon, 1986.

Sources Cohen, J. L. and Benton, Tim: Le Corbusier: Le Grand, London: Phaidon, 2008.

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Von Moos, S.: Le Corbusier – Elements of a Synthesis, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.

Watergate Hotel Stefano Milani

1 View of the Watergate complex model

Introduction The legendary Watergate building complex in Washington DC consists of a series of six interconnected, curved buildings, designed between 1962 and 1969 by the Italian architect Luigi Moretti and constructed between 1964 and 1971. Although “Watergate” became a byword for a dark period of American history and sublimates a direct reference with the building that “staged” the notorious break-in and consequent scandal that toppled the presidency of Richard M. Nixon and changed the course of American politics, the name indicated the nearby Watergate Steps, a curving structure completed in 1932 and originally intended to provide access to the Potomac River and at the same time a docking point for boats, and later transformed into an amphitheatre for musical performances, for which a barge was anchored at the structure’s base.1 Site, design The site of this unconventional urban intervention is defined by a triangular parcel that lies at the point of convergence of the three main elements that structurally define the city of Washington: the proximity to the Lincoln Memorial—the apex of the monumental and representative city structure; the fringe of the city grid crossed by diagonal avenues; and the natural structure represented by the system of parks that originates from the Potomac riverbank. The main idea of Moretti’s project was to make use of the freedom suggested by the sloping park with a series of curving buildings staged 145 Watergate Hotel, Washington

2 Studies of the morphological configuration of the building complex

on the river. Although this “informal” set-up has frequently been traced back to the historical antecedent of the royal crescents conceived by John Wood the Younger for the city of Bath in England, Adrian Sheppard—a reference scholar on the Watergate and a former Moretti collaborator—has specified that this association did not directly inspire the Moretti project, and the reference was used more as a justification during the presentation of the final proposal to the Washington Fine Arts Commission.2 Instead, the origins of these formal choices have to be traced back to Moretti’s interest in the morphological aspect of the building, which would always predominate over the programmatic one. Again, Sheppard reminds us that, especially during the early design phases, the morphological facet of the project took precedence over its functional resolution. The design process during these early phases was all about articulating curvilinear forms of buildings and open spaces. For Moretti, morphology was an essential focal point, as well as a theoretical orientation. It was a means of understanding and defining concepts of structure, form and space and a way to establish a clear relationship between natural setting and man-made forms.3 During the 1950s, Moretti had departed from his familiar, rigid, rectilinear buildings and began to experiment with more organic, curvilinear forms in reinforced concrete. We can trace back to this 146 Stefano Milani

3 View of the two semicircular Watergate South buildings 4 View of Watergate East from the inner garden

period the development of some of the Watergate design elements, such as the concave, cantilevered entry roofs of the Watergate East and the streamlined string courses, and the rhythmic, undulating swells of concrete, one on top of the other, of the façades. In this respect, the Watergate is highly representative of this mature phase of Moretti’s work. The six buildings of the Watergate complex are constructed of reinforced concrete and range in height from eleven to fourteen storeys. The buildings share basic design elements, with the primary distinction being the presence of balconies on the apartment buildings and the hotel. The buildings are interconnected by a complex series of underground parking garages, above-ground walkways and the bilevel mall located behind Watergate East. Only approximately three acres of the site are occupied by aboveground buildings, while the remaining acres are left as open land, walkways or recreational areas such as swimming pools and fountains. The grounds of Watergate comprise both architectural and natural features that link the six buildings together and define the surrounding 147 Watergate Hotel, Washington

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landscape. Automobile traffic is fairly limited on the site, but on-grade paved driveways are found on both the north and south lengths of the Watergate Hotel, and a below-grade driveway circumscribes Watergate South on the east and north and leads into the parking garage. In the Watergate, the incessant sequence of differences determined by the free modulation of the shape of the balconies is the leitmotif that generates the formal experience. The light vibrations produced by the balconies’ ever-changing elements and the shadow of the recessed façade produce endless series of chromatic sequences. Here, the principles of Moretti’s composition, theorized in a series of fundamental essays such as Valori della Modanatura (1951), Trasfigurazioni di strutture murarie (1961) and Strutture e sequenze di spazi (1952), seem to be pushed to the extreme. If the modanatura in this case is only evoked by the endless fragmentation of the elements of the balustrades, the drawing of the façades, which have been conceived almost independently from the plans and from the program, produces an integral transfiguration of the tectonic structure of the buildings. Lobby It is difficult to recognize the conventional character of lobbies when considering the complexity of the Watergate. The “lobby” seems to dissolve its specific connective role within the multiple articulations generated by the different semi-public open spaces. The plinth literally becomes new ground, allocating the complexity of the program and accommodating the formal freedom of the residential buildings, which result as entities with a relative, visual independence. It could be singled out that the entrance lobbies and loggias appear as cavities in the façades, points of intensification of the shadow leading the observer inside the buildings, as well as moments of typological invention. Of particular interest in order to grasp the specificity of the lobby/loggia system at the Watergate is the double lobby at the Watergate East, the first of the six buildings to be constructed in 1964, a thirteen-storey apartment building with a long, curvilinear footprint, located at the intersection of Virginia Avenue and New Hampshire Avenue. This building serves as the gateway to the Watergate complex and provides access to the mall beyond through an open loggia at the first-storey level, flanked by glass-enclosed lobbies on each side. In the unconventional double lobbies generated by the loggia, we can trace a clear reference to the split façade of the Casa Girasole in Rome (1947–50) and also to the façade of the Casa-albergo in Milan (1947–50). The loggia is set off, on the east elevation, by a wide, cantilevered canopy with a vaulted, elliptical shape. The floor of the loggia has polychrome paving, with fields of polished white aggregate, polished gray aggregate and orange pebble aggregate arranged in a flame pattern. The loggia is supported on massive concrete piers and leads to a wide, open stair that extends down to the mall. The stringers 149 Watergate Hotel, Washington

are lined with marble cladding, and at the center of the stair is a large concrete fountain consisting of wide, bowl-shaped basins. The loggia leads to a two-storey, sunken mall that links with the underground parking garages. The basin fountain in the loggia of Watergate East is mirrored on the west side of the mall by another fountain, similarly descending down towards the mall opening, and consisting of two large, round basins linked by a sluice. In the other buildings, the system varies, although the approach remains similar. In the Watergate West, the main lobby is accessed from the Virginia Avenue elevation and is sheltered by a rectangular, cantilevered roof, while, in the Watergate Hotel, connected on all floors with the office building to form a T-shape, the lobby is “excavated” by the car drop-off that enters the building. The theme of splitting comes back in the Watergate South and the 600 New Hampshire office building, two semicircular buildings opening on to the Potomac River. The two apartment buildings are linked to Watergate East by an extension of the balconies on the lower storeys intertwining in an S-curve pattern. Here, the lobby is reached through walkways and through a paved drive flanked on the east side by a concrete retaining wall, echoing the pattern of the balconies.4

Notes 1

2

3 4

Sources

Moeller, G. Martin and Gerard Martin Moeller (Eds.): AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C., 2006, p. 186. See: Sheppard, Adrian: The Watergate project: a contrapuntal multi-use urban complex in Washington, DC, p. 9. Online paper available at: www.mcgill.ca/architecture/faculty/sheppard/; accessed on April 1, 2011. Op. cit. Adrian Sheppard. See the report for the National Register of Historic Places. Online document available at: http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/ 05000540.pdf; accessed on April 1, 2011.

150 Stefano Milani

Bucci, F., Mulazzani, M. and Later, N.: Luigi Moretti: Works and Writings, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. Reichlin, B. and Tedeschi, L.: Luigi Moretti. Razionalismo e trasgressività tra barocco e informale, Milan: Electa, 2010. Rostagno, C.: Luigi Moretti. 1907–1973, Milan: Electa, 2008.

The Amsterdam Hilton Hotel Old Amsterdam’s Little America Hugh Maaskant, with F. W. De Vlaming and H. Salm (1958–62) Apollolaan 138, Amsterdam OudZuid, the Netherlands Filip Geerts

1 The Hilton hotel with petrol station and main entrance in its plinth, 1962

In the 1950s–1960s, Hugh A. Maaskant (1907–77) was the architect of choice for corporate capital emerging from the post-war reconstruction period in the Netherlands. As the ultimate pragmatist, he managed to be always in line with the policies and tendencies of the moment, accumulating a vast portfolio of commissions. His immediate legacy has been split between a highly critical reading of his work through the ideological lens of Team-X, from the 1970s onwards, and the later documentation of his prolific activity as relevant and interestingly symptomatic of architectural modernism’s equivalent of Realpolitik in the Netherlands. Never a reformist, his reputation as a rational and technocratic architect, believing in the virtues of capitalism and the liberal rhetoric of post-war democracy in the face of the cold war, made him an obvious candidate to give form to the growing amount of transatlantic investment in Europe. The hotel chain founded in 1919 by Conrad Hilton with the purchase of a hotel in Cisco, Texas, had just become the largest hospitality company in the post-war world in 1954. That same year, the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce insisted again on the necessity for hotel accommodation in the port city that was gradually being reconstructed from wartime destruction, with the initial emphasis understandably on rebuilding housing and the port infrastructure. 151 Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam

2 Entrance to the hotel, with show cases at the sides, 1962

Maaskant’s involvement with the Amsterdam hotel originates from his appointment by the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce as architect for the Rotterdam franchise. Hilton Hotels International, decided to invest on condition that the two locations were developed simultaneously. In Rotterdam, the plans were for a hotel on the Hofplein, the new roundabout that was becoming the heart of post-war Rotterdam, on the edge of the new business district, featuring all the amenities for work and leisure, and diagonally across from the spectacularly modern heliport from where Sabena operated its Rotterdam–Antwerp–Brussels helicopter service from 1953 until 1965. Once this location had been decided upon, Maaskant had opportunistically commissioned himself to design the project ‘Television hotel’ for this site in 1956, making him the obvious candidate to be the architect for the Hilton later on. Amsterdam was also in a hurry to welcome the tourists starting to fly in to Schiphol Airport on KLM’s Lockheed Electras and, from 1960 onwards, the first Douglas DC-8 jetliners. The office of F. W. De Vlaming en H. Salm, considered for the Amsterdam hotel, was to be supervised by Maaskant, with a much larger office behind him. In Amsterdam, the slightly V-shaped footprint that became something of a trademark of Hilton hotels worldwide (variations of which can be found in Algiers, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Dallas, 152 Filip Geerts

3 Typical guest room, 1962 4 The bar area adjacent to the main lobby, 1962 5 The seating area with fireplace in the middle of the lobby, 1962

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Athens, Beverly Hills and Rome) elegantly responds to the path of the Noorder Amstelkanaal behind the hotel. This V-shape, together with countless examples of the 1950s and 1960s inherited from Le Corbusier’s Y-type office tower – itself a development of his cruciform Cartesian skyscrapers – proves particularly useful when integrating the public space of a large building with the traffic patterns of a modern city, requiring a drop-off in front. The drop-off zone in this case sits adjacent to where Apollolaan and Minervalaan meet, the two main avenues of a stately residential area, part of H. P. Berlage’s 1917 Amsterdam extension (Plan Zuid). The site where Berlage had envisioned a building for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the axial focus of the Minervalaan at the opposite extreme of the equally unbuilt railway station of his plan, was the prominent greenfield land the Amsterdam Hilton would occupy. Concrete strips in the façade reveal the nine floor slabs with the hotel rooms. Parapets, pilasters and the stair–lift bay are finished in brick. A cantilevering canopy, featuring the landmark red-neon hotel sign reminiscent of an American diner on top, highlights the entrance, repeating the slight slant of the façade. One is welcomed on both sides by two winter gardens just before entering the revolving doors leading into the lobby. At the back, towards the canal, a terrace and a garden face a marina, an aspect highlighted by the hotel design, which features a glass wall on the ground-floor facing the water, making the lobby somehow see-through and less ‘indoor’ than the Rotterdam version. As opposed to the Rotterdam hotel (1956–63), expected to cater primarily for German businessman with business at the port, the larger and more luxurious Amsterdam hotel (1958–62) was geared to receiving American tourists. What both hotels have in common, apart from Maaskant’s involvement, is something the Amsterdam and Rotterdam Hiltons have in common with all those other hotels with which Conrad Hilton was conquering the free world, in an entente with competitor Pan American World Airways founder Juan Trippe’s InterContinental. The legacy of both tycoons was expected to project well into the future, as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where a Pan Am Space Clipper docks with a space station featuring a Hilton hotel. The international hotel standard devised by these corporations had become the starting point for postwar hotel architecture. A divide exists between a straightforward, slablike high-rise containing identical, well-equipped, but relatively small rooms on top and a ground-floor plinth with extravagant public spaces. The hotel-slab was part of the generic vocabulary of Hilton: a repetition of sets of two narrow rooms mirrored along the bathroom. Maaskant had modelled his hotel rooms on a first-class cabin of the SS Rotterdam, the passenger liner launched in 1958 by the Holland–Amerika Lijn (HAL), an important investor in the Rotterdam Hotel. The plinth was, each time, adapted to the specificities of site and local considerations, often featuring shops, themed meeting rooms and public programmes in addition to the hotel lobby. 155 Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam

Hilton’s catalogue functioned as an element of resistance for the architects who were involved. Maaskant focused on the big picture, intending his contribution to the design to be able to survive all possible later retrofits, which would follow the latest fashions and future, as yet unimaginable, tastes. The Hilton assignment marks the transition in his portfolio from a mechanistic phase of industrial and housing projects to projects where representation was key. The Hiltons were to accommodate both the mechanistic aspect and the representational one in a schizophrenic superposition. The luxurious, over-the-top, decorative hotel style was often pitted against the purist reflexes of modernist architects. Maaskant, less sensitive to possible ideological reservations about this somewhat cheap display of wealth, managed to put emphasis on the timeless spatial aspects of the hotel that transcended the interior decorative onslaught. He attempted to keep control of the volumetry, sight lines and transitional spaces, in order to give a clear framework for the frenzied décor provided by the interior designers of the Hilton Corporation (Emmanuel Gran, director of architecture and interior design, and Inge Bech, interior decorator). A decade later, interior designers of this type of operation were accused by Herbert Weisskamp (in his Hotels: An International Survey, published by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1968; original German published by Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart, 1968) of ‘horsing around with chandeliers, fake antiques and folksy bric-a-brac’. Similar critiques were already heard in architecture circles when the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel was opened officially on 9 May 1962 as the third Hilton hotel in Europe, the first in the Netherlands (the first of any international hotel chain for that matter) and the first Hilton not designed by an American. The tourist was to feel at home in a faux-Dutch atmosphere, shuttling between the Jan Steen bar with brass plates on the wall and the centrepiece of the lobby: a brass chimney suspended from the ceiling, hovering above an open fireplace – the ritualistic centre for a modernist nomadic tribe that would gather on the massive, 13-metrediameter, circular, red–orange–brown, custom-woven rug surrounding it. The critique was against the aesthetic produced by this particular instance of Hilton-ideology, not directly that ideology itself, as had been the case in Rome, where a campaign, although unsuccessful, had been launched against the construction of the Hilton Hotel on Monte Mario (also 1958–62). Despite Hilton’s insistence on having air conditioning everywhere, even in temperate northern regions, because for him it addressed noise and pollution as well as cooling, it was successfully resisted in the Dutch Hiltons, as well as in West Berlin. Today, the Amsterdam Hilton advertises all of its 271 rooms as air conditioned, and that is not the only change since 1962. From 1996 to 1998, a renovation took place, including the lobby by Peter Ellis of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In late 2009, plans were announced to add two more floors on top, mentioning that this had been considered a possibility in the original design, referring to the disproportionally high protrusion of the 156 Filip Geerts

elevator shaft. The mutations in Amsterdam are instances of many such alterations around the world, we learn from Annabel Jane Wharton’s book Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture: ‘The architecture itself has mutated, with most Hilton interiors undergoing drastic redesigns to keep pace with fashion. Often, this means the clean lines that once encapsulated 20thcentury American style are obscured by ornate postmodern elements.’ Around the time the Berlin Wall came down, the Hilton Company became just another hotel chain, no longer on the front line of Conrad Hilton’s own private cold war: ‘Each of our hotels is a little America, to show the countries most exposed to communism the other side of the coin.’ Room 902, the presidential suite, one of the corner rooms on the south side that, thanks to the relatively quiet Amsterdam-South setting, features a balcony and the location of John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Bed-In for Peace in March 1969, has now become room 702, themed as the John and Yoko Honeymoon Suite. The Amsterdam Hilton is a constantly repolished, ageing, five-star gem remaining in the Hilton portfolio, its marketed notoriety derived from the 1969 honeymoon event in it, the 1991 assassination of drug-baron Klaas Bruinsma next to it, and the 2001 musician–painter–actor–poet–rock ‘n’ roll icon Herman Brood’s suicide jump from it, rather than from that iconic lobby interior, so politically incorrect at the time and, sadly, long gone. Maaskant would probably not have cared. Sources Barbieri, S. U. (Ed.): Architect H.A. Maaskant (1907–1977), Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1983. Provoost, M.: Hugh Maaskant. Architect van de vooruitgang, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003. Wharton, A. J.: Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

157 Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam

SAS Hotel, Copenhagen Arne Jacobsen, 1955–60 Joan Ockman

1 Entrance

A doorman in crisp top-coat, hat, and white gloves ushers you in from the sunny sidewalk on Hammerichsgade under two projecting canopies through a double layer of plate-glass doors flanked by a pair of black, marble-clad piers (fig. 1). Abruptly, like Alice, you’re elsewhere. The illumination is diffuse and tenebrous; the sound level is a civilized murmur, absorbed by an acoustical ceiling painted dark green-gray and punctuated with parallel rows of recessed spotlights. The main lobby area is populated, though sparsely, with womb-like chairs arranged on area rugs spread over a grid of marble pavers. The Norwegian pavers are cool grayish-white but richly veined, reflecting light cast from the ceiling. Guests sit here and there in upholstered “Eggs,” languidly smoking or reading. Some converse around low, round tables enlivened by small vases of colorful flowers (fig. 2). Off to the right, a metallic stair spirals like a three-dimensional question mark into a circular opening in the ceiling (fig. 3). Beyond, a diaphanous drapery screens some sort of garden into which natural 158 Joan Ockman

2 General view of lobby

daylight appears to filter from above. You’ll accept these invitations in due course; first, to the business of passports and room keys. Directly in front of you, on axis with the vestibule, is an alcove with elevators, its walls also black-marble-clad and broodingly dark. Left of them is the reception. You make your way diagonally across with your bags. A long, box-like fixture, suspended from the ceiling by slender standards, sheds light on the counter. The counter is veneered with wenge wood polished to a velvet sheen. Here, where “Repose speaks in all”—as Edgar Allan Poe recommended in “The philosophy of furniture”1—Danish modern meets Hollywood. Gone is your hectic busyness, your shoddy everydayness. You’re in a tableau vivant of refined and graceful hospitality, serene but sensuous. You swan, like Greta Garbo’s Russian ballerina in Grand Hotel, ostentatious in your anonymity, discreetly glamorous. All this has to be imagined now. Arne Jacobsen’s Gesamtkunstwerk for the Scandinavian Airline System has been irrevocably altered by successive hotel owners. All that remain intact today are its outer shell, an evanescent curtain wall rising twenty storeys into the Copenhagen sky above a two-storey podium, and one room, lovingly preserved, on the sixth floor, available for booking with sufficient notice.2 The SAS building has been called a work of “late cool 159 SAS Hotel, Copenhagen

3 Seating areas, counters and reception desks in lobby

4 Early watercolour perspective of exterior seen from direction of Tivoli Gardens. Signage for Hotel Globe appears over the hotel entry

modernism” and “first and foremost a stringently controlled and clarified total design.”3 Jacobsen’s magnum opus was this, but also something more, or else: an illusion of totality and layered transparency carried to a point of surreality. Nor is transparency quite the right description of the building’s extremely subtle gradations of materiality and immateriality. Liminality is better. Commissioned by the flagship airline of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway to develop a scheme for the building based on the company’s preliminary studies of the site, Jacobsen began working on “SAS House” in 1955. He was tasked with designing a multifunction complex combining an in-city airline terminal serving Kastrup Airport twenty kilometers south—an exemplary work of early Danish modernism by Vilhelm Lauritzen, designed in the mid 1930s and poised to undergo a jet-age expansion, also by Lauritzen, in 1960—with an adjoining 275room hotel. The terminal opened in spring of 1959; the hotel made its debut in summer of the following year. Publication of early perspective drawings in 1956 elicited public outcry (fig. 4). At twenty-two storeys, the Hotel Globe, as it was called prior to being renamed the Royal Hotel, was to be the tallest building in downtown Copenhagen, rising at one of the busiest intersections in the city and next to a railroad trench, on an awkward site long deemed unbuildable. The Danish magazine Arkitekten complained, “the business world, which brings in foreign currency, has more influence on the City Council’s urban plans than the urban-planning experts.”4 Local papers voiced concerns that the high-rise’s scale would not just overwhelm Tivoli Gardens, located one block east on Vesterbrogade, but would also compromise the city’s picturesque, six-storey skyline, with its medieval towers and spires. The resemblance of Jacobsen’s plinth-and-tower parti to Skidmore, Owings 160 Joan Ockman

& Merrill’s Lever House in Manhattan, completed in 1952, did not go unnoticed; why, one critic asked under the headline “New York in Copenhagen,” should the Danish city strive to imitate the American metropolis?5 Jacobsen and SAS were undeterred in pursuing their initial scheme, but they were hardly insensitive to its local context. Set back asymmetrically from the building base like its American model, the tower was the subject of hundreds of studies. Its curtain wall ended up as a taut skin of light green-gray panels, alternating with continuous bands of similarly tinted fenestration. The vertical proportions of the skin and the thin aluminum mullions accommodating operable windows gave the building volume much greater delicacy and refinement than Lever House and made its upper reaches appear to dissolve under the atmospheric conditions of swiftly changing clouds and northern light. At the base, the darker-colored podium held the lot line on three fronts, offering a series of shops accessible from both the street and the lobby on the Vesterbrogade side, with an elegant secondfloor restaurant alluringly visible to pedestrians. As Herbert Weisskamp would note in a survey of new international hotels published in 1968, the end of the previous decade had ushered in a major boom in hotel building around the world. Its origins lay in the post-war growth of commercial aviation, lowered airfares, and the flocking of droves of Americans to Europe and other destinations for purposes of both business and pleasure. In response, the most prestigious international hotels had evolved a generic aesthetic of “decorative lushness”: The guest may enjoy the “important entrance” created for the “important person” he is; he may enjoy becoming “enfolded into a more intimate situation as he approaches the registration area”; he may enjoy being “virtually surrounded with concern,” by the “total environment based on a guest-oriented philosophy” which is being sold to him.6 With its borrowed-one-better Americanisms, the SAS building played on all these clichés (in quotation marks); yet Jacobsen pushed them to a point of rarefaction where modernist aesthetics became tinged with tongue-in-cheek wit and a kind of uncanniness. Taking CIAM’s spoon-to-a-city philosophy almost ad absurdum, he designed virtually everything in the building—from the ashtrays, vases, furniture, curtains, cutlery, bedding, carpets, clocks, light fixtures, door handles, display cases, telephones, and stationery, to the signage and even the airport buses —less for the sake of logical consistency than to create an entirely hermetic and poetic world. The effect might be characterized as magic rationalism. Undoubtedly, the most magical and imaginative public space in the SAS lobby was the winter garden. Tucked behind the spiral stair— 161 SAS Hotel, Copenhagen

5 Winter garden, looking through double wall of hanging orchids into snackbar 6 Ground-floor

whose levitational structure was a development of the more modest fire stair Jacobsen had invented for the Jespersen Building (and also a refinement of Eero Saarinen’s suspended stair at General Motors Technical Center)—the winter garden was originally conceived as a kind of palm court with wicker lounge chairs à l’anglaise. As built, the double-height, near-square “room” was covered by a gridded ceiling of opalescent glass panels and partly veiled from the rest of the lobby by see-through curtains. On its east and west sides, Jacobsen immured a row of three round, white columns between two glass walls and, interspersed with the columns inside the double layer of glass, he suspended more than a hundred varieties of orchid, creating a “threedimensional wallpaper” of hovering plants.7 The interior sitting space contained a grouping of Jacobsen’s Pot armchairs, upholstered in chartreuse wool fabric on thin steel legs, disposed around low, rosewood-veneered tables. Veritably a room within the larger room of the lobby, it had an aquarium-like ambience reminiscent of nineteenthcentury glass-roofed arcades (fig. 5). The other public areas of the lobby—whose overall size on two levels was 29 by 16 meters—were likewise characterized by meticulously designed and variegated sequences of spatial and optical thresholds, from the snack bar behind the winter garden, accessible through another glass door and partitioned into small, convivial eating booths by oak-lattice screens, to the suite of fashionable shops and tasteful stalls along the lobby’s perimeter (figs. 6 and 7). On the second level, the stair and elevators debouched in a discreetly dark, rosewoodpaneled, carpeted lounge, with recessed perimeter lighting and standing lamps, another seating area with Jacobsen’s signature Swan

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couches and a bank of writing desks, the more intimate Orchid Bar adjacent to the overlook into the winter garden, and, at the other end of the floor, the hotel’s finely appointed restaurant, with its luxe, calme et volupté—its sixteen domed skylights, three dining rooms, and glass wall, visible from the seating areas through a translucent, hand-woven curtain. In its exacting and seemingly effortless attention to detail, Jacobsen’s immersive design fused industrial technology with traditional craftsmanship, creating an exquisite balance between the two at a moment when the building’s American international-style model was still, belatedly, a foreign import in the context of Copenhagen. While treating the hotel as an entirely artificial realm, Jacobsen steeped it in material references to the natural world, yet often of an exotic nature. His design conjures up Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the modern technician and the traditional artist. The cameraman is to the painter, writes Benjamin in his famous passage, as the surgeon is to the magician; “mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its [seemingly] pure aspect freed 163 SAS Hotel, Copenhagen

from the foreign substance of equipment is . . . the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”8 Jacobsen’s paradoxical, late-modernist wit, which both partakes of the romantic naturalism of the total work of art and exaggerates it to the point of strangeness, also represents a kind of transfiguration, or swansong, of the early modernist trope of the hotel lobby as seat of bourgeois anomie and ennui, from Lukács’s “Grand Hotel Abyss” (“equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity”9) to Kracauer’s “Hotel Lobby” and “Boredom” (“In tasteful lounge chairs a civilization intent on rationalization comes to an end”)10. But perhaps closest of all to Jacobsen’s heterotopian poetics at SAS, and very possibly directly inspired by them, is Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime. Tati made several trips to Scandinavia in the early 1960s and may well have visited the SAS Building shortly after it opened; he, or his scenographer, may also have seen the sample furnishings and the photomontage of the building that were displayed in the exhibition Formes Scandinaves at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in late 1958. In Tati’s unforgettable film set, the same glass building morphs interchangeably from an airline terminal to a hotel, to an office building, to a convention center, to an apartment block, to a snack bar, to a restaurant called the Royal Garden, which bears more than a little resemblance to Jacobsen’s at SAS. From the opening image—of a glass high-rise vacuously mirroring the clouds in an all-but-vanished Paris— the film appears a further imaginative transposition of Jacobsen’s magical implantation of “New York in Copenhagen.” Notes 1

2

3

4

5

“The philosophy of furniture” (1840), in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Vintage Books, 1975, p. 466. See Sheridan, Michael: Room 606: The SAS House and the Work of Arne Jacobsen, London: Phaidon, 2003. Tøjner, Poul Erik and Kjeld Vindum: Arne Jacobsen: Architect and Designer, Copenhagen: Danish Design Centre, 1994, p. 10. Skriver, Poul Erik: “Vor tids bybyggere,” Arkitekten U, 49–50, 1956, p. 377; cited in Thau, Carsten and Kjeld Vindum: Arne Jacobsen, Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2001, p. 442. “Saa stort, og saa flot . . . og saa farligt!” Information, November 21, 1956; cited in Thau and Vindum, ibid., p. 430.

6

7 8

9

10

Weisskamp, Herbert: Hotels: An International Survey, London: The Architectural Press, 1968, p. 7. Thau and Vindum, Arne Jacobsen, p. 436. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Benjamin, Walter: Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969, p. 233. Lukács, Georg: Preface to The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, p. 22. “The hotel lobby,” in Kracauer, Sigfried: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 178.

Sources Sheridan, M.: Room 606: The SAS House and the Work of Arne Jacobsen, London: Phaidon, 2003. Solaguren, F.: 2G Books. Arne Jacobsen: Public Buildings, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2005.

164 Joan Ockman

Thau, C. and Vindum, K.: Arne Jacobsen, Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2001. Vindum, K. and Thau C.: Absolutely Modern, Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2003.

The war lobby of Prora KdF Seebad on Rügen For 20,000 people, by Clemens Klotz (1936–9) Filip Geerts

1 The sweeping curve of Prorer Wiek today

Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, begins the epilogue with: The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.1 That same year, 2 May saw the birth of mass tourism (one such opportunity for the masses to express themselves), when the leader of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF)), Dr Robert Ley, laid the foundation stone of the first of five planned seaside resorts of the affiliated leisure organization Strength through Joy (Nationalsozialistische Gemeinschaft ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (NSG ‘KdF’)) 165 KdF Prora, Rügen

2 Rendering of the 400m x 600m plaza with the festival hall (above) and one of two reception halls for check-in (below); from Herbert Hoffmann, Deutschland baut, Stuttgart, 1938

on the eastern shores of the Baltic island of Rügen, facing the Bay of Prora, between a wide sandy beach and a pine forest with a brackish ‘bodden’ (a type of lagoon characteristic of the island) behind. The result of a design competition for the pilot KdF-Seebad, announced in February and soliciting eleven architects (including Emil Fahrenkamp, Erich zu Putlitz, Heinrich Tessenow, Hermann Giesler, German Bestelmeyer and Clemens Klotz) selected by Albert Speer, the head of Beauty of Labour (Amt für Schönheit der Arbeit (SdA), the other important DAF affiliation), was not yet known at the time. However, one of the architects, Clemens Klotz from Cologne, a former member of the Deutsche Werkbund (an organization banned since 1933), a 1933 NSDAP-member recently appointed professor by Adolf Hitler, and acquainted with Ley since 1925, had already made significant proposals after the acquisition (possibly requisition) of the 3.5 million square metres of beachfront property in the summer of 1935. After inspecting the competition results in August 1936 in the KdF exhibition pavilion at the Berlin XIth Olympics, Hitler decided to go with Klotz, provided that the festival hall be built according to Erich zu Putlitz’s project, thus combining the neu-sachlich signature of Klotz with a neo-classical accent. The project was awarded a Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris World Fair. Ley received 100 million Reichsmark for what became the second largest construction project for civilian purposes (after Todt’s arguably less complete and less civilian network of Reichsautobahnen) and the largest building in existence in the Third Reich – size being its most important legacy. ‘Greetings from Prora’, starts the British critic Jonathan Meades’ commentary for his 31 October 1994 BBC documentary, Jerry Building, Unholy Relics of Nazi Germany, visiting the remains of Prora soon after the (former East) German army had left and it became accessible to the general public. He sees Prora as, ‘the prototype of the slummy hatches that were erected all over Europe 25 years later by the package-tour industry. It was National Socialism that showed the entire continent how to trash its coastline’. He continues: ‘There was no such thing as a Nazi style of building but there was such a thing as a Nazi size of building and it was vast, XXXL and then some.’ Size was the only point of consensus, as there was no unanimity on style in the party. Meades mentions that Goebbels was sympathetic towards modernism, whereas Göring believed that small rooms weakened the race. Prora happens to be a massive collection of exactly that: about 7,000 small rooms, 2.20 by 4.75 metres. The complex erected along the beach is approximately 4.5 kilometres long, laid out in plan along one-sixteenth of a circle, rendering the local geography evident with mathematic precision. The long chain of six-storey residential blocks lines the smooth curve of the beach, reminiscent of Sagebiel’s 1935–41 Tempelhof airport terminal hugging the airfield in Berlin. The centre of the resort is formed by a massive 400 metre by 600 metre plaza that would have surrounded the festival hall, if built. The plaza, with the railway station just to the 166 Filip Geerts

3 The repetition of staircases and communal bathrooms at the back

4 A room, as it appears behind each window: 2.20m × 4.75m

north of it, was the first sight the visitor would get of Prora: lined with administration buildings, including a campanile-like tower looming behind on the north side, north and south cafes and a cinema on the south side, the plaza extends out on to the beach, where the stone plinth connects to two mooring piers for the world’s first purpose-built cruise liners: MS Wilhelm Gustloff and MS Robert Ley. The plaza is an open-air lobby, if we understand Prora to be a hotel. The lobby can be understood as a parade ground, where the holidaymakers gathered, multiplying their anticipation into an assembly: a Thingplatz, the ancient Germanic tradition misappropriated by the Nazi Party. The reception buildings, lobbies if you will, were check-in machines, comparable only with what we now know from airports or only the largest hotels in Las Vegas. From their respective reception buildings on the plaza, a north and a south wing stretch out symmetrically along the beach promenade, each side dividing up the beach into four identical zones, north wing 1–4 and south wing 1–4, separated by five paquebot-style buildings for communal dining projecting on to the beach, each seating 2,000 (apart from the foundation plinths, still present on the beach, these were never built). The roughly 500-metre-long segments of beach thus created would leave about 5–10 square metres of Lebensraum per tourist. Each guest, in identical bathing suit, would bring an identical set of beach gear provided by KdF, part of a massive Existenzminumum Gesamtkunstwerk of room furnishings and kitchenware. Jonathan Meades paints the picture according to Ley: ‘There are no private 167 KdF Prora, Rügen

5 KdF propaganda: KdF-wagen (above) and Prora resort (below)

individuals anymore. Ley’s notion of leisure, for anyone other than himself, was compulsory communal games, compulsory communal walks, compulsory lectures in Germanic culture, compulsory communal gymnastics.’ Across the continuous promenade and a front yard, each zone is faced by the guest accommodation, presenting an uninterrupted façade of windows and more windows. The ground-floor would contain shops and services. The elevation, punctured with an endless repetition of square windows – no balconies – is broken by two symmetrically positioned risalit sections with a slightly different façade. Behind each window: a 2.20-by-4.75-metre room, furnished with two beds (one on each side), a washstand with tap water and privacy curtain, wardrobe, small table with two chairs and couch. Two such rooms could be connected en suite for family occupancy (sleeping six, using the couches). There are over 7,000 identical rooms in 4,400 metres of building, all with sea view, for the enjoyment of 20,000 vacationers. The back of the slender slab is animated by a repetition of perpendicular wings containing staircases and communal bathrooms. Also at the back, two indoor swimming pools, with artificial waves, one at the centre of the northern section and one in the south, were to be built. Two sets of employee housing areas were arranged behind the north and south guest wings, with Heimatstil cottages (the preferred, if not obligatory, residential style of the Reich) for 2,000 workers. Klotz also planned a hospital, a school, a plant nursery and a farmyard. A pumping station allowed for the supply of drinking water for what was to become a small town. There was underground parking for 5,000 KdF-Wagen (‘5 Mark die Woche musst du sparen – willst du im eignen Wagen fahren’). No civilian ever saw his KdF-Wagen come his way. The cars that would later become the Volkswagen Beetle were to have been Nazi Germany’s version of an Italian idea, the Fiat 508 ‘Balilla’, which was in production from 1932 to 1937. Mussolini brought the private car to the masses, just as Italian fascism pioneered mass tourism as the exercise of pretending to be bourgeois for a short period and then returning to the duties of alienating work. Ley’s KdF was inspired by the Duce’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND) that, since 1931, had sent Italians on chartered trains on trips through the country. KdF trains had been shuttling Germans around Germany since 1934, organized by Amt Reisen, Wandern, Urlaub, making the travel department soon the most important of all of KdF’s divisions, and the world’s largest tour operator. In addition to the trains, KdF operated nine ships at a time: passengers, however, were not allowed to disembark in the Norwegian fjords visited en route. Prora can be best summed up as an additional cruise ship, on land, its passengers voluntary prisoners. KdF’s founding in November 1933 coincided with the final absorption of the Labor Front (Arbeitsfront), an offspring of the small National Socialist trade union of the Weimar Republic, into the NSDAP. KdF as a leisure organization was Ley’s surrogate for a large, corporatist 168 Filip Geerts

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Nazi trade union. In the new Reich, allied with big business, meddling in industrial disputes was exchanged for organizing leisure time in order to ‘win the hearts of the workers’, without supporting their interests. When organizing exhibitions and concerts for the masses in factory halls proved not so successful, equal access to culture was exchanged for travel and leisure as the substitute for higher wages and workers’ rights. Class struggle became the struggle for some room on the beach. The existing tourist sector was, despite the crisis, not happy with proletarian KdF holidaymakers replacing the more solvent customers that were gradually starting to reappear. Similar industry concerns were voiced at the time in France, in relationship to the ‘loisirs’-policies of the Front Populaire. KdF’s mass resorts were as much about holidaying for the proletariat as about preventing the proletariat ruining the holidays of the privileged class in the established resorts. In this way, the KdF vacationers became pioneers in territories hitherto left aside by tourism, away from the established spa resorts and kept off the beaches of the well-to-do. Whereas the inland expanses of Germany provided enough Lebensraum for the masses not to bother the elite, the coastline available was (still) more limited and needed some careful planning in order to avoid class struggle. In order for this to work, rationalization took control, and a new industry was born: first in Rügen, later extended to four more locales, and in 1940 a total of ten mass resorts were envisioned, catering for 3–4 million vacationers a year. Ley’s solution to the ‘struggle for the joy of work’ (a call of the ‘planist’ Henri de Man), in the face of alienating rationalization in the sphere of work, was more rationalization: in the sphere of leisure. There is something to be said for the claim that Prora is international modernism’s original sin, the first attempt at truly endless repetition. Although there was never one single Nazi style, 169 KdF Prora, Rügen

there was a kind of division of labour between the stripped-down neo-classical, the so-called Heimatstil pseudo-vernacular, and the modern. When pragmatism was needed, rather than representation or ‘blood and soil’, for something akin to a gilded barrack: modern was just fine for Prora. The smallness of the rooms was the only thing private about a complex essentially consisting of collective spaces, epitomized by the endlessly long and very wide corridors: streets in the air almost. Prora is Le Corbusier’s ‘machine à habiter’ taken on a holiday. It would remain the only KdF resort and it was never used as such by the 20,000 holidaymakers it was intended for. Construction started for real in the summer of 1937, and, in the summer of 1939, construction of the festival hall was postponed, with the rest of the edifice, except for the communal dining wings, almost completed: KdF brochures show that seven out of eight hotel-block sectors and the southern reception building were topped out, and the railway connection was built. Prospective tourists wanting to book for the summer of 1939 had to be turned away, as the opening was planned only for the 1940 summer season. That summer, Hitler’s Germany had planned to be ready, not only for the opening of the holiday season, but for war as well. Note 1

Benjamin, W.: ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: epilogue’, in Arendt. H. (Ed.): Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York, Schocken, 1969, p. 246 (originally

published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung as ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 1936).

Sources Leser, P.: Der Kölner Architekt Clemens Klotz, 1886–1969, Diss. Cologne, 1991. Liebscher, D.: ‘Organisierte Freizeit als Sozialpolitik. Die faschistische Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro und die NS-Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude 1925–1939’, in Petersen and Schieder (Eds.): Faschismus und Gesellschaft in Italien, Cologne, 1998. Rostock, J. and Zadnicek, F.: Paradiesruinen. Das KdF-Seebad der Zwanzigtausend auf Rügen, 3rd edition, Berlin, 1995.

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Spode, H.: ‘Ein Seebad für zwanzigtausend Volksgenossen. Zur Grammatik und Geschichte des fordistischen Urlaubs’, in P. J. Brenner (Ed.): Reisekultur in Deutschland. Von der Weimarer Republik zum ‘Dritten Reich’, Tübingen, 1997. Wilkens, R.: ‘Gebaute Utopie der Macht. Das Beispiel Prora’, in R. Schneider (Ed.): Moderne Architektur in Deutschland. 1900–2000. Macht und Monument, Ostfildern, 1998.

Exploding the lobby Hyatt Regency, Atlanta John Portman and Associates, 1967 Charles Rice

1 View of terraces and elevators in lobby

John Portman’s Hyatt Regency Atlanta reinvented the atrium hotel in the midst of massive urban upheaval in the post-war United States.1 Portman’s account of the Hyatt Regency’s atrium design captures something of its ‘sudden’ appearance, the ‘explosion’ of the lobby into the atrium: 171 Hyatt Regency, Atlanta

I didn’t want the hotel to be just another set of bedrooms. The typical central-city hotel has always been a cramped thing with a narrow entranceway, dull and dreary lobby for registration. Elevators over in a corner, a closed elevator cab, a dimly lighted corridor, a nondescript doorway, and a hotel room with a bed, a chair, and a hole in the outside wall. That was the central city hotel. I wanted to do something in total opposition to all this. I wanted to explode the hotel; to open it up; to create a grandeur of space, almost a resort, in the centre of the city. The whole idea was to open everything up; take the hotel from its closed, tight position, and explode it.2 This odd combination of the oasis-like and the explosive gives quite an accurate reflection of the singular spatial condition of the Hyatt atrium. On entry, nothing prepares you for the fact that the entire core of the rather nondescript twenty-two-storey building is

2 Façade and entrance of Hyatt Regency Hotel

172 Charles Rice

3 Repetitive terraces and galleries

entirely hollowed out. A golden metal sculpture pushes up through the atrium floor into a spreading, conical shape, while a branching, circular metal-lattice canopy hangs down almost to the floor from a single steel cord attached to the atrium’s ceiling. Five gondola elevators glide soundlessly up and down the exposed elevator shaft, completing the dramatic, yet strangely peaceful, scene. As much as Portman claims the role of visionary in the atrium’s explosion on to the architectural scene, as developer as well as architect he initially proposed a conventional hotel with doubleloaded corridors for the site. This design was abandoned because the limited number of guest-rooms this configuration allows would have been unable to produce the required revenue to make the development successful.3 Drawing on his own design for the Antoine Graves Homes of 1964, where compact accommodation for the elderly was arranged around two naturally ventilated, roofed atriums, he discovered a way to maximize the room configuration for the Hyatt. Opening up the middle of the hotel would increase the site area available for guest-rooms, while keeping the overall mass within height limitations. In the same way that the atrium suddenly appeared in the hotel, it was immediately successful, though the atrium’s impact on the hotel’s commercial performance was not initially grasped. Portman and his development partner, Trammel Crow, were forced to sell the hotel prior to its completion, when their major equity investor pulled out of the project. They attempted to secure interest from the hotel 173 Hyatt Regency, Atlanta

4 Elevators

operators Marriot, Western Loews and Hilton, each of whom passed on buying the hotel because they thought the atrium was a waste of space that would negatively affect hotel revenues. Just before its completion, the hotel was bought by the Pritzker family, owners of the small, west-coast hotel chain known as Hyatt House. From the time it was opened, the Hyatt achieved and maintained almost full occupancy, and the hotel was able to raise the ratio of in-house food and beverage sales to accommodation revenue to 75 per cent, which then became the industry standard.4 This was clearly the result of a synergetic effect between experience of a novel kind of space (certainly for your average hotel and convention-goer in late 1960s America) and their interaction with the revenue-generating hotel functions, such as bars, restaurants and retail, which benefited from the ambience of the atrium. There was simply no need to go outside: the atrium provided all one needed. But the story of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta is not simply one of individual commercial success as the result of an idiosyncratic spatial innovation. The innovation had effects that appear more dramatic when seen in urban terms. To draw these out, it is worth describing the hotel formally. In its basic configuration, four slabs of guestrooms are arranged around the atrium in what is effectively a pinwheel formation. The sense of rotational motion set in play by this formation emphasizes the building’s internality, which is underscored

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by the two circular sculptural elements in the atrium, the elevator cabs and the circular bar, which sits in a spaceship-like pavilion above the atrium roof. There is also a very real sense that the atrium is not quite the inside as distinct from the outside. There is a distinct similarity between the materiality, composition and detailing of the outside façade of the building and what we might call the inside façade of the atrium. The atrium appears to have been formed through a topological inversion of the building’s envelope. Imagine a building twice as tall as the Hyatt, with the top half of its envelope folded down inside the bottom half, like a sock folded in on itself. This transformation is possible owing to two factors. First, the thinness of the hotel’s main programmatic element, the guest-rooms, means they can sit within this folded-in façade. Second, the hotel’s convention facilities can then occupy the large-scale spaces of the podium on which the rooms and atrium sit. This ‘pulling through’ of the envelope, conventionally that aspect of a building that is presented to the exterior as a public ‘face’, is also a ‘pulling through’ of urban exteriority. The result is that the building no longer simply appears to the city as exterior form. Rather, it appears to itself on the inside, where this inside is transformed into urban space. In this reasoning, the outside is no longer the primary urban condition; the building has no external presentation of its urbanism, which is now an interior urbanism. This interior urbanism requires a series of attachments to make it complete. The Hyatt is part of a still-developing network of mixed-use buildings Portman designed, developed and still largely owns, known as Peachtree Centre, which began in 1961 with the wholesale Merchandise Mart.5 The Hyatt, along with commercial towers, retail and entertainment space, car parks, two more atrium hotels (the Westin Peachtree Plaza, completed in 1976, and the Marriot Marquis, in 1985) and a continually expanding Mart, are all joined by above-grade pedestrian walkways that knit Peachtree Centre together. This network of connections further reinforces the synergetic effects between Portman’s developments and ties the Hyatt’s atrium into a larger schema of urban movement that has little or no relation to a conventional urbanism of blocks and streets, except that, as a developer, Portman still had to operate within the property boundaries that they structured. Thanks to the above-grade walkways, internalization of movement within the Peachtree Centre maintains spatial contiguity ‘above’ and separate from the city’s grid organization. The development of Peachtree Centre commenced at a time of crisis in Atlanta’s downtown and inner-urban area. Federal urban renewal programmes, along with the implementation of the national highway system, were allowing the dispersion of the city through massive suburban growth, leaving the inner city to the poor and disenfranchized. As one kind of solution to the crisis of downtown (a solution that would be copied in Portman developments and buildings in San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York), the 176 Charles Rice

networked development of Peachtree Centre tried to reinstate the idea of downtown. It is commonly considered, however, that these kinds of development actually replace the idea of downtown with a new, ersatz experience built on artificiality and exclusion. Although this view is certainly valid, it measures the development against a type of urbanism that it had no ambition to repeat. Instead, what emerged at this moment was the linking of a new kind of space and its attendant urban interiority with a different kind of urbanism, one that began to be conceived of at a regional and then a global scale. From the early 1970s, Atlanta developed a new metro system, with a station virtually under the Hyatt, linking downtown with Atlanta’s airport, which rapidly became a national and then international hub. The Hyatt atrium now exists as a reservoir within a global, urbanized network of movement defined by connections between vessels of interiority.

Notes 1

2

3

I am describing this as a reinvention because examples of hotels with large internal atriums exist from the nineteenth century, e.g. the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver (1892) and the Great Central Hotel (now the Landmark Hotel) in London (1898); however, the atrium Portman set in place with the Hyatt Regency Atlanta related to a historically new set of urban conditions, as this article will attempt to show. Portman, John and Jonathan Barnett: The Architect as Developer, New York: McGraw Hill, 1976, p. 28. Henry, Edward: ‘Portman, architect and entrepreneur: the opportunities, advantages and

4 5

disadvantages of his design-development process’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1985, p. 169. Henry, ‘Portman, architect and entrepreneur’, p. 183. Portman had established the mart in 1957 as a wholesale furniture showroom with an adaptive development of a car park building in downtown. On the origins of the mart, see: Portman, John and Jonathan Barnett: The Architect as Developer, New York: McGraw Hill, 1976, pp. 24–5.

Sources Futagawa, Y.: ‘John Portman: Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Georgia’. GA, 28, 1974. Henry, E.: ‘Portman, architect and entrepreneur: the opportunities, advantages and disadvantages of his design–development process.’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1985.

Martin, R.: ‘Money and meaning: the case of John Portman’, Hunch, 12, 2009: 36–51. Portman, J. and Barnett, J.: The Architect as Developer, New York: McGraw Hill, 1976. Riani, P.: John Portman, Washington: American Institute of Architects Press, 1990.

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The Viru Hotel, Tallinn Modernist in form, late socialist in content Andres Kurg

1 General perspective of the first floor seating area and information desk

The construction of the Viru Hotel in the centre of Tallinn, at that time capital of the Estonian SSR, was closely related to the opening of the Soviet Union to the West in the period of the Khruschev Thaw and to the city’s geographical closeness to Finland, the country’s longest-term trade partner on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Built for Intourist, one of the two all-Soviet joint-stock companies, the hotel was intended for foreign tourists. It was developed as part of an industry that, from the early 1960s onwards, was recognized as a way to earn hard currency. In 1964, a decree from the Soviet Council of Ministers planned the construction of fifty-four new hotels all over the country. In the same year, after an unofficial visit of the Finnish president UrhoKaleva Kekkonen to Estonia, and an official one to Moscow, it was agreed to establish a passenger-boat connection between Tallinn and Helsinki. A year later, the first boat arrived in Tallinn, after a threehour trip across the Baltic Sea, bringing with it 200 Finnish tourists, the first of a total of 10,000 that year, a number that quickly doubled in the next year. Early sketches for the Viru Hotel were drawn late in 1964, in Estonia’s largest state design office, Eesti Projekt, by architects Henno Sepmann and Mart Port. They defined the new building as an 178 Andres Kurg

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international-style high-rise, with hotel rooms located in a twentytwo-storey tower and services, restaurant, cafes and bars situated in a two-storey, lower, horizontal volume.1 Visually, the two-part slab block recalls images of Brasilia’s Congress building’s administration towers by Oscar Niemeyer, an architect deeply loved in the Soviet Union. The way the vertical block rises asymmetrically at the end of the service volume, as well as an open courtyard in the middle of the horizontal part, refers to the model of Lever House in New York. An even more relevant prototype in Viru’s case was the Radisson SAS Hotel in Copenhagen, where the complex organization of lobby, cafes and restaurant into a single continuous arrangement was later named by the interior designers as one of their important influences. That iconic landmarks of Western modernity were tolerated, and even encouraged, reflects the policies of the Khruschev era. Architecture was given a key role in providing an image of the country’s efforts to raise its living standards, of ‘catching up and overtaking’ the West. Viru’s dominant character was emphasized by the prominence of its site: situated close to Tallinn’s key tourist attraction, the medieval Old Town, the monumental block bridged a small park and a large square functioning as a transport intersection. In Eliel Saarinen’s master plan 179 Viru Hotel, Tallinn

3 Perspective of reception desk

for Tallinn in 1913, the same square was reserved for the new Town Hall, while, during the early Soviet years, a House of the Soviets was proposed for this spot. However, none of these proposals was realized. The hotel would become the first true high-rise at this location in Tallinn, reigning over all views of the central town. In 1967, Intourist decided that Viru’s contractor would come from Finland, a rather unusual choice in those days. Official rhetoric explained this as an answer to the call of the Finnish Communist Party: a gesture of help to Finnish workers suffering unemployment owing to economic recession. A pragmatic explanation, however, lies in Finland’s interest in obtaining Russian roubles for buying cheap oil and gas and the Soviets’ desire to impress visitors with standards familiar to them. Indeed, the Khruschev reforms had, in a few years, been replaced by the practical Brezhnev era. As a result, the programme of surpassing the West by producing quality commodities was replaced with trade agreements that intended to compensate for the shortage of Soviet consumer goods. Instead of showing the power of the Soviet workers in achieving a top-quality building, it was now enough to import the builders and state-of-the-art technologies. The foreign contractor changed design features and construction technologies. Precast concrete panels were replaced by in situ concrete, and the tower block acquired a more plastic frame, with white ceramic tiles as the finish. The in situ technology also enabled the two lower floors of the lobby and the restaurant to be more flexible in plan. New technical equipment in the hotel included air conditioning and the newest appliances in the kitchen as well as in the laundry. The interior design was altered, following the finishing materials and standards used in Finland. Väino Tamm, together with Vello Asi, the main interior architect, had spent a year studying design in Finland with a UNESCO stipend. All other members of the interior-design team 180 Andres Kurg

4 General view of Hotel Viru and its surroundings

(Loomet Raudsepp, Taevo Gans and Mait Summatavet) were taken to Finland at least twice and introduced to the latest work and materials in the field.2 Thus, when the 462-room hotel was finally ready in 1972, it offered familiarity to its mostly Finnish visitors, but equally importantly, with its restaurants on the first and twenty-second floor, flame-red grill room on the ground-floor (where food was prepared right in front of the visitors’ eyes) and a variety show in the basement, it was an exotic site for locals offering a new type of leisure, a way to escape from the Soviet everyday and imagine oneself elsewhere.3 The visitors to the hotel were introduced to the atmosphere of the lobby even before the entrance, where the dark-brown, suspended aluminium ceiling of the building’s protruding lower volume formed a stark contrast to the monumental and dazzlingly white tower. The dramatic effect was underlined by lights that punctuated the ceiling and pushed the space further downward. The ceiling continued seamlessly on the other side of the glass wall separating the lobby space, which had an equally dim and inviting character. The walls and floors of the lobby were finished with dark-brown ceramic tiles, repeating the configuration of the façade tiles. A rectangular group of leather sofas in the middle of the room, massive wooden tables on a single copper leg and the long reception desk along the side wall were all similarly dark and contributed to the overall mood and rational organization. Past the elevators, in front of the glass wall of the courtyard, a single flight of stairs led to the upper level of the foyer. With its height of 4 metres, varnished-oak wall panels and dark-green leather sofas, this was more spacious and luxurious. This part of the building was clearly meant for foreigners only: the lobby extended to a windowless bar that was selling drinks for hard currency and where there was no business for locals. On a black-and white photograph taken not long after the opening, the atmosphere of the bar is secretive but seductive: the light sources are hidden, the walls are covered in dark wooden panels, and the lit shelves display exotic drinks not available elsewhere in the city. From the first-floor lobby, one could access conference rooms as well as the main restaurant, which seated over 250 visitors and which had a separate entrance for locals on the ground-floor. In contrast to the rather minimally decorated lobby spaces, where furniture was subject to the building’s architectonic rhythm, the restaurant demonstrated the imperative of the synthesis of the arts. Most notable was an installation that consisted of nearly a thousand long, narrow, glass tubes (by Aet Andresma-Tamm and Mare Soovik-Lobjakas) hanging from the high ceiling and following the asymmetrically placed partition walls that divided the large hall into irregularly sized zones. If the floorplans describe the physical dividing lines between the tourists and the locals, we can also imagine the invisible barriers in the hotel, as well as the ways for crossing those barriers and the places for contact and circulation. The lobby, restaurant, cafeterias and the night club became the grounds for meetings and connections between the 181 Viru Hotel, Tallinn

5 View from one of the elevated seating areas towards reception desk 6 Entrance and reception desk (facing page) 7 Ground-floor 8 Section

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locals and tourists, ranging from just hearing a foreign language at the table next to you, to illegal speculations with foreign currency or branded clothes, to prostitution. Closer to the end of the Soviet Union, the hotel acquired a fraudulent and vice-ridden reputation, and the press reported pejoratively on ‘retailers’ who were after jeans, tights or foreign cigarettes. Owing to their exceptionality, tourists from capitalist countries were also surrounded by people who had to follow their pursuits and inform on suspicious behaviour to the infamous Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB. The hotel’s singular position in the city, with a traffic junction in front, a park on one side and a large square on the other, could be seen as a device for containing tourists, by confining them in a high tower and locating them in a place that allowed observation of their movements to and from the hotel. A recent publication reveals also that small, windowless rooms behind the first-floor lobby bar, marked on the project as storage and administration rooms, were indeed centres from where up to sixty of the hotel rooms, the restaurant and the sauna were monitored through tapped telephones and hidden microphones.4 Equally hidden from visitors’ eyes were the hotel’s huge kitchen and bakery, which took up almost one-third of the first floor, behind the restaurant and conference centre. To hide the kitchen staff also from being overlooked from the street, a corridor ran alongside large windows on the outer perimeter of the lower building block, and the work spaces were top-lit by rooflights. Up to the early 1990s, when the hotel’s owner was Intourist, all bookings as well as the budget and profits were managed via Moscow. For a long time, even the hotel administration did not know how much it charged foreign tourists for rooms.5 The hotel was sold to new owners in 1993, and the interiors were considerably rebuilt; in 2004, a large shopping centre was attached to the building from the side of the square. Instead of repelling local visitors, the hotel had now to start to attract them, in order to maintain its profits. In many ways, the Viru hotel was exceptional in Tallinn’s context: its height that dominated the rest of the city, its construction technology and interiors, the products sold there and the conspicuous, bourgeois ways of spending time. David Crowley has, in another context, named similar hotels in the Eastern block as ‘extra-territorial’: lying beyond ordinary society and its rules6; and in many ways Viru Hotel fits this description. Yet it was at the same time perfectly ‘territorial’, representing the paradoxes and pursuits of the late-Soviet period. Estonia has, in the Soviet context, often been viewed as an exceptional border zone, ‘Soviet abroad’, where one could indulge in Western-style cafes and restaurants, enjoy more liberties in the cultural sphere than in the theatres and galleries in Leningrad or Moscow, and follow uncensored information by listening to Finnish radio stations or watching TV. However, this Westernized image was kept in tight check by the regime. As Anne Gorsuch has argued, Estonia’s special position was tolerated, as it was part of the Soviet Union and its difference was 184 Andres Kurg

turned to the system’s benefit: ‘medieval European architecture, comfortable cafes, and Finnish-built hotels were burnished to a fine Soviet sheen’.7 It could be seen as a way to manage the conflict between inflexible ideological structures wishing to close the country off from foreign influence, the growing pressure to open the country up to foreign trade and a desire, particularly visible in Soviet border areas, for new liberties. The Viru Hotel, which featured in the 1970s and 1980s in numerous picture books and brochures of Tallinn, not only represented this paradoxical Westernization, but also played a significant part in how this period of late-Soviet contradictions and boundary crossings opened out. Notes 1

2

3

The preliminary project and documentation is kept in the Museum of Estonian Architecture, f. 4, n. 2, s.10. Jagodin, Karen: ‘Modernistlik ruumikontseptsioon ja nõukogude ideoloogia kohtuvad Viru hotellis (Modernist concept of space and Soviet ideology meet in the Viru Hotel)’, in Viisteist. Eesti Arhitektuurimuuseumi kogumik, Tallinn: Eesti Arhitektuurimuuseum, 2006, p. 142. Kalm, Mart: ‘Kui sisearhitektuur oli tähtis (When interior design was important)’, Vikerkaar, 12, 2007, p. 45.

4

5 6

7

Nupponen, Sakari: Viru hotell ja tema aeg (Viru Hotel and its time), Tallinn: Eesti Ekspressi Kirjastus, 2007, p. 53. Nupponen, Sakari: Viru hotell ja tema aeg, p. 45. Crowley, David: ‘Architecture and the image of the future in the People’s Republic of Poland’, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2009, p. 79. Gorsuch, Anne E.: All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011, Chapter 2.

Sources Crowley, D. and Pavitt, J. (Eds.): Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970, London: V&A Publishing, 2008. Gorsuch, A. E.: All this is your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jagodin, K.: Tamm ja Asi, Tallinn: Museum of Estonian Architecture, 2007. Jagodin, K.: ‘Modernistlik ruumikontseptsioon ja nõukogude ideoloogia kohtuvad Viru hotellis’ [Modernist concept of space and Soviet ideology

meet in the Viru Hotel], Viisteist: Eesti Arhitektuurimuuseumi kogumik, Tallinn: Eesti Arhitektuurimuuseum, 2006. Kalm, M.: ‘Kui sisearhitektuur oli tähtis’ [When interior design was important], Vikerkaar, 12, 2007. Kalm, M.: Estonian 20th Century Architecture, Tallinn: Sild, 2001. Nupponen, S.: Viru hotell ja tema aeg [Viru Hotel and its time], Tallinn: Eesti Ekspressi Kirjastus, 2007.

185 Viru Hotel, Tallinn

Hôtel des Thermes, Dax Jean Nouvel and Emmanuel Cattani, 1992 Hans Teerds

1 Lobby with view towards the pool

At first sight, the Hôtel des Thermes in Dax, designed by Jean Nouvel and Emmanuel Cattani, is very simple in its form and structure. It just seems to follow the lines of the plot, forming a rectangular building: four wings of hotel rooms around an atrium and also four storeys of rooms above two storeys of serving spaces. At one end of the atrium, the pool and the thermal facilities of the hotel are located. They dominate the atmosphere in the atrium. The centrality of the pool in the hotel seems remarkable, but the name of the hotel throws light on the underlying reason: it is a thermal pool. Most of the hotel guests are visiting Dax because of the thermal springs in the city, which is located in south-western France, at the edges of the forests of the Landes region and Chalosse and along the river Adour. The city had already been famous for centuries for its thermal waters. The first traces of the city date from the pre-Roman period, but particularly during Roman times it became important because of these thermal springs. Nowadays, the city consists of about 20,000 inhabitants, and its appearance is still dominated by thermal 186 Hans Teerds

2 Façade of Hôtel des Thermes

tourism: big hotel and thermal complexes, hot springs and fountains in and around the city, and tourists wandering on the boulevards and along the borders of the river. The Hôtel des Thermes is located along the Adour near the city’s most famous hotel, the Hotel Splendid. According to all tourist guides, the Hotel Splendid is a major landmark of the city, a key work of 1930s art deco architecture in France. The U-shape building is a whiteplastered, sculptural mass with elevated windows and arcs on its rooftop – almost fairy-like. The façade of the 1992 Hôtel des Thermes, facing the Hotel Splendid, is slightly offset, thus creating a public space in-between both hotels that opens to the city and closes the view on the river. A garden with grass, trees and greenery marks this spot, as well as some parking spaces. Hotel Splendid has its entrance on this side, via the inner court of the U-shape. Surprisingly, the Hôtel des Thermes doesn’t. Nouvel planned its main entrance on the street and city side of the hotel. This deviation of one wing with hotel rooms not only creates a slightly enclosed outer public space, it also creates room 187 Hôtel des Thermes, Dax

3 View from swimming pool towards lobby

in the atrium on the opposite side of the entrance – the side of the river – which therefore could house the pool. This particular urban layout actually is a subtle hint at Nouvel’s reluctance to simply follow the situational circumstances. Situational and geographical circumstances are important in Nouvel’s view of architectural design, but they don’t deliver one best solution. In a 1995 interview, Nouvel stated that his design process always started with the ‘precise analysis of situations. Without the knowledge of how things happen we cannot exploit the potential of this new layer on the urban field’.1 Such a precise analysis does lead to an interpretation beyond what is visible at first sight; the design is beyond sameness. ‘What interests me is the pertinence of a response in respect to a specific context’ – a pertinence that is not only based on analysis of the situational, geographical and political environment, but also deals with the programme of the future building. Design is, according to Nouvel, ‘to be sure that one has gone through all possibilities, all interferences, all intelligences, in respect to a problem. And that is what usually unfolds in differences’.2 Nevertheless, this process is, according to the architect, not about the 188 Hans Teerds

4 Gallery system of corridors along the lobby

spatiality of the future situation, but more its exteriority. As he stated in the same interview: Spatial qualities are no longer as crucial as they were. Even if the nature of architecture is to master space, the materiality, the textural quality, or the signification of the surfaces are becoming increasingly crucial. The tension between objects become registered in the surfaces, the interfaces.3 Despite the convincing spatiality of the hotel and how it deals with its environment, the crux of the design indeed seems to be its materiality. The exterior of the hotel is dominated by metal shutters with wooden strips in front of the French balconies of the hotel rooms. The shutters, like the glass façade behind them as well, can be opened or closed by the hotel guests, according to their preferences. If both façade layers are opened, only tiny metal wires and a handrail form the threshold between inside and outside. Because of the tactile structure of the second layer of the façade of the hotel, the shutters and the 189 Hôtel des Thermes, Dax

5 Cafe area in the lobby

wood, and because of a pergola structure on the roof consisting of the same metal structure filled in with wooden strips, the edges of the building block are softened. According to the drawings, the plan was to cover the pergola with greenery, but this has not yet happened. The two lower storeys seem to have sharper boundaries between inside and outside: they are filled with glass in rectangular metal frames. Also on these two levels, the hard lines are softened by big white sunscreens, casting shadow on the mirroring glass. Open and closed shutters, as well as open and closed sunscreens, give the hotel simultaneously a lively appearance and openness to its environment. Moreover, both structures underline the message that the building is actually used, that it houses guests, and that the hotel is not a structure or building alone; it consists of its guests. In addition, the interior of the hotel illustrates the idea that the building is the inconspicuous background of the hotel’s activities, while being radically different from these activities. You enter the atrium at the city-side of the hotel: one level of hotel rooms is spared here, and the pergola on the rooftop of the hotel is a bit curved. Going underneath the hotel rooms, you enter the atrium, which simply follows the outer form of the hotel. Palm trees and other greenery have a prominent place in the atrium. ‘Cheap’ terrace chairs are grouped here and there. At the other end of the atrium, the pool is visible 190 Hans Teerds

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through a glass wall. On the left, one finds the reception; stairs and lifts to the upper levels are located on the right of the hotel, opposite the reception. Despite the fact that the lower levels of the atrium consist of the same rectangular glass structure as the lower outer façades, the atmosphere in the atrium seems to be opposite to the appearance of the exterior. Whereas the outer façades speak of openness and flexibility, the atrium feels more distant, as a result of the particular materialization. The corridors on the upper levels circumscribe the 191 Hôtel des Thermes, Dax

atrium: a fence of metal wires – the same as used in the French balconies on the exterior – lightly demarcates the edge of the corridors; the thickness of the floors is covered with mirroring white panels. From the atrium, the closed, white-stuccoed walls between the corridors and the hotel rooms are visible, as well as the white doors leading to these rooms. Blue lamps light the corridors. Those upper levels, with their white and blue coolness appear as distant, private. In the atrium, daylight falls through a pergola construction of metal and wooden strips above a glazed roof. The wood filters the light nicely. Despite the dimmed, soft daylight, hard, cool light dominates in the atrium, not only because of the blue-coloured light of most of the lamps, but also because of blue glass in the windows, the blue tiles in and around the pool and the dark tiles on the ground in the atrium itself. This evokes the atmosphere of a swimming pool, which, in fact, is reinforced by the pool itself, the palm trees and the terrace chairs. The circular pool is centrally located in the hotel, at the waterside end of the atrium under a cave-like steel and glass structure – its surrounding facilities sited under the hotel-room wings. It was planned that this cave structure would be overgrown with greenery, but to date the pool is visible from the lobby. The cool materiality of the lobby – reflected in the entrance, pool and corridors in the upper storeys – should again be seen as mere backdrop to the activities of the hotel. Guests and vegetation bring life and colour into the atrium. Big palms and other greenery slowly wave. Guests walk into the hotel, past reception to their rooms, sit for a while under the palm trees on terrace chairs or walk from their rooms to the thermal facilities. Despite Nouvel’s specific design, this hotel is about the guests and the facilities, about the ‘events’ that are happening here. Architecture is about the people and what they are doing, and only in response to that can it also be a masterpiece of art.

Notes 1 2

Zaera, Alejandro: ‘Incorporating: Interview with Jean Nouvel’, p. 23. Zaera, Alejandro: ‘Incorporating: Interview with Jean Nouvel’, p. 28.

3

Zaera, Alejandro: ‘Incorporating: Interview with Jean Nouvel’, p. 32.

Sources Bekaert, G.: ‘Hôtel des Thermes in Dax, Jean Nouvel and Emmanuel Cattani’, Archis, no.4, 1992: 33–5. Bosoni, G. (Ed.): Jean Nouvel, Architecture and Design 1976 – 1995, A lecture in Italy, Milan, 1997. Blazwick, M. J. and Withers, J. (Eds.): Jean Nouvel

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Emmanuel Cattani Associés, Zurich, 1992. Mateo, J. L. et al. (Eds.): Jean Nouvel, His Recent Works, 1987–1990, Barcelona, 1989. Zaera, A.: ‘Incorporating: Interview with Jean Nouvel’, in: El Croquis 65/66 Jean Nouvel 1987–1994, Madrid, 1995.

Hotel Lakolk, Rømø, Denmark Friis and Moltke, 1966 Eva Storgaard

1 Aerial photograph of hotel in the landscape

The hotel lobby is not only an architectural feature that was articulated in urban contexts and in close affinity with the public space of the boulevard or square. In the 1960s, all over Europe, lobbies were defined as features that were strongly related to automotive travel and engaged with the landscape. A good example is the lobby of the Hotel Lakolk by the Danish architects Knud Friis and Elmar Moltke. Friis and Moltke gained great fame in the 1950s for their onefamily housing projects, which were both very modern and deeply rooted in the Danish tradition. In the 1960s, their assignments not only broadened towards larger-scale projects, such as school buildings and hotels, but also towards newer materials, such as concrete. Hotel Lakolk is exemplary in this sense and introduces one of the first examples of brutalism in Denmark. Hotel Lakolk is situated close to the seaside on the small island Rømø, in the western part of Denmark, surrounded by the shallow Waddensea and the North Sea. Since the island was connected to the 193 Hotel Lakolk, Rømø

2 From the lobby towards the landscape 3 From the landscape towards the lobby

mainland in 1947 by an embankment for automobile traffic, it has become a popular holiday and leisure destination for the middle class. The site-specific features of dunes and sand-hills were decisive elements both in the choice of construction material and in the way the building was situated. The architects had an outspoken wish to relate to the site and to use the presence of sand in the construction. Concrete was therefore an obvious choice. The result is a monolithic volume, which visually grows out of the ground. The transition between ground and building is blurred by grassed rooftops and by the fact that the building has no plinth. It follows the curved morphology of the terrain and merges literally with the rough, natural wilderness that surrounds it. The consistent use of concrete is also – as a logical result of the architectural approach mentioned above – implemented in the interior of the hotel. The roughness of the concrete, exposed on the exterior, is redirected and refined in the interior. Arriving in the lobby of the main building of the hotel, large windows open on an immediate view of the sea in the distance and dissolve the boundary between the inside and the outside. Along this view, big stepping-stones are positioned in the landscape, forming both

194 Eva Storgaard

4 Ground-floor area of lobby 5 Concrete stair within the lobby

a path to the sea and a shortcut to the various rooms, which are disposed around three open patios. Hence, the lobby immediately underlines the essence of the architectural approach: the hotel’s close relationship to nature. The lobby is divided into two parts – a distribution zone at ground level and a lounge zone at the upper level. The ground-floor acts as an intermediate zone that enables a gradual transition between the public and the private domains, between urbanity and nature. Arriving, passing and leaving are the main activities. All use is temporal, and this state of temporality is architecturally embodied in the character of the interior, which is enveloped by exposed concrete columns and beams, walls and ceilings and concrete flags on the floor. The space is modestly furnished by only a few seating groups (chairs by Alvar Aalto), and a fixed concrete bench. Lighting elements – large box fittings in dullpolished aluminium with white acrylic panels – are placed in a regular pattern close to the ceiling. The interior of the ground level suggests a high degree of neutrality, which at the upper level is exchanged for a more private, almost domestic sphere. The two lobby zones are connected by a broad concrete staircase, which mediates the transition between the public and semi-private realms. The fact that the zones are not divided by any doors, but only by the treads of the staircase, is inviting and gives the upper lobby an accessible character. Halfway up the staircase, the exposed concrete of the ground-floor is superseded by wooden laths painted in a colour close to the concrete. The transition from one texture to another announces the different atmosphere of the upper level. At both levels, the structural, exposedconcrete elements, such as columns and beams, give a clear rhythm and structure to the space, but, at the upper level, the brutality of the concrete is subdued by the introduction of surface materials such as wood, carpets, tiles, whitewashed masonry and textiles. Towards the sea, the sitting room is extended with a covered balcony. The roof canopy above this balcony and a part of the indoor area are painted white so as to reflect the sunlight and visually to connect the outside and the inside. This upper part of the lobby is conceived as one big ‘sitting room’, provided with a bar, a piano and a 195 Hotel Lakolk, Rømø

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fireplace. It is subdivided by means of furniture groupings, which provide partial enclosures that gather around the view or the fireplace. Towards the greyish backdrop of the wooden panels, the monochrome upholstered settees and chairs in red (by interior architect Harbo Sølvsten), the blue carpeting and the polished-aluminium cylindrical pendant lamps pick up on the prominent use of colour, which is applied throughout in the remaining parts of the hotel (by artist Emil Gregersen). The lobby of the Hotel Lakolk represents an array of elements that characterize the specific approach within modernism of the Scandinavian countries, well known for its successfull combination of aspects of modernism with local building and dwelling practices, and the indispensable need for individuality and domesticity. One of the main forces of this Scandinavian approach can be found in the wide consideration of the interior as being part of a bigger architectural totality. The profound treatment of, and attention paid to, the different layers of the interior represented by the structure enveloping the space, surfaces, furniture, lighting, objects, soft furnishings and textiles are also of primordial importance in this lobby. The informal and domestic character of the lobby illuminates, at the same time, aspects of the social and cultural values of Scandinavia in the 1960s, where non-hierarchy and a democratic attitude were basic components in design and architecture approaches. Whereas the traditional lobby provides a feeling of exclusivity and distinction, the lobby of the Hotel Lakolk creates the feeling of being at home while being on vacation.

Sources Bjerregaard, Lotte Marianne: ‘Forsegling og Symbiose. Naturvidenskab og naturromantik – en dialog i moderne arkitektur. Belyst via studier af grænsen mellem inde og ude’, Arkitektens Forlag, 2005, pp. 218–19. Friis, Knud: ‘Hotelbyggeri i rå beton’, Betonteknik, no. 1, 1968.

Lund, Nils-Ole: ‘Hotel Lakolk, Rømø’, Arkitektur, no. 6, 1966, pp. 241–51. Skriver, Poul Erik: Friis og Moltke, Copenhagen, 1997.

197 Hotel Lakolk, Rømø

Gramercy Park Hotel 2 Lexington Avenue, New York Nicky Ryan

1 General view of lobby

Original building, 1925: Architect: Robert T. Lyons. Developer: Bing and Bing. Refurbishment, 2006: Designer: Julian Schnabel (with Michael Overington and Anda Andrei). Developer: Ian Schrager.

198 Nicky Ryan

The significance of Gramercy Park within the history of interior architecture resides in the identity of its designer and his source of inspiration – the artist’s studio – and the reputation of its developer, Ian Schrager, a formative influence on hotel trends. The hotel was designed by neo-expressionist artist, sculptor and film director Julian Schnabel and was modelled on his own home and place of work. Schrager claimed that Gramercy Park represented the ‘invention of a new genre’.1 With its rich renaissance colours, contrasting textures and idiosyncratic fixtures and fittings, the refurbishment appeared to represent a departure in terms of style from the minimalist boutique hotels that had proliferated since the 1990s. ‘WALKING INSIDE THIS LUXURY NEW YORK CITY HOTEL: AN EXPERIENCE AKIN TO STUMBLING INTO AN ARTIST’S STUDIO OR HOME – AN UNPREDICTABLE AND COMPLETELY PERSONAL FANTASY.’ 2 Lobby, Gramercy Park Hotel, with paintings by Julian Schnabel, Suddenly Last Summer, no. 1 (2005), and Cy Twombly, Bacchus (2005).

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3 Rose Bar, Gramercy Park Hotel, with paintings by Julian Schnabel, Suddenly Last Summer, no. 2 (2005) and Teddy Bears Picnic (1988), and Andy Warhol, Rorschach (1984).

‘The lobby and public space of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City are a vivid and operatic feast of visual tension and art – an enlivening mélange of the ‘new’ High Bohemia. Seemingly haphazard combinations of surreal contemporary pieces and centuries-old furnishings create an alternative universe that’s like stepping into a 3-D painting – a classical vocabulary transformed into an edgy new language.’2 Boutique hotels are small-scale establishments, usually with between fifty and one hundred rooms, with a thematic, architecturally notable design and aimed at affluent visitors in the 25–55-year-old age range. Consumers looking for something different to standard hotel provision would be attracted by factors such as location, quality, uniqueness, amenities and personal levels of service.3 Ian Schrager is usually credited with introducing the boutique hotel concept and, in collaboration with French designer Philippe Starck, developed a signature style that combined a sense of theatre with a minimalist aesthetic. 200 Nicky Ryan

In hotels such as the Paramount, Delano, Sanderson’s, Clift, Mondrian and Hudson’s, the limited size of the bedrooms encouraged guests to spend more time socialising in the lounges, bars and lobbies. With his background in nightclubs, including Studio 54, Schrager refashioned the hotel lobby into a location for exclusive social gatherings framed against a backdrop of spectacular lighting and theatrical visual effects. The lobby was reinvented as a new kind of gathering place, a fashionable site of entertainment and spectacle, where guests engaged in what the developer referred to as ‘lobby living’. 4 The lobby in the Gramercy Park Hotel, like those of the boutique hotels that preceded it, provided an important social venue for both tourists and style-conscious local residents. On special occasions, the lobby was roped off, and entry was restricted to individuals who were judged to be interesting enough to mingle with celebrities and other invited guests. The lobby was a ‘scripted space’, where participation in staged events was part of the services offered.5 Hotel staff, often parttime models or actors hired on the basis of looks and style, played an integral role in this experience as part of an ‘aesthetic economy’.6 The 2006 refurbishment of the eighteen-storey high-Renaissancerevival building designed by Robert T. Lyons in 1925 paid homage to the ‘bohemian credentials’ of the original. Since its opening, Gramercy Park had been a popular ‘downtown’ haunt for artists, filmmakers, fashion editors, architects and actors. The hotel’s artistic heritage was referenced and accentuated in Schnabel’s redecoration, which had as its centrepiece the lobby as gallery space. Schnabel adorned the lobby with huge, museum-worthy canvasses worth millions of dollars, painted by himself and his former friends Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. Displaying art in hotels is not a new idea, and, in the 1990s, ‘art hotels’ such as the Hotel des Arts, San Francisco, and Fox Hotel in Copenhagen began to proliferate. The benefit for hotels in having a close association with the arts was that it created a point of difference from the competition and could attract media attention. The rise of the ‘art hotel’ reflected the increasing fashionability of art as ‘a metropolitan mass pursuit’ and the associated growth in cultural tourism that had occurred since the 1980s.7 Although Gramercy Park is often referred to as an ‘art hotel’, Schrager refuted this classification and argued instead that its distinctiveness lay in the ‘artistic’ lifestyle evoked. In the twenty-foot-high lobby and adjoining Rose and Jade Bars at Gramercy Park, artistic and bohemian identity is signified through what appeared to be an informal-looking ensemble of furniture and fittings, including objects renovated from flea markets, made to order by craftsmen or designed by Schnabel. This was not a casual juxtaposition of artefacts, but a highly ordered space that deliberately excluded mass-produced and generic products. The bronze tables, lanterns, rug, door handles, curtain rods, finials and hand-carved 201 Gramercy Park Hotel, New York

fireplaces were designed by the artist and formed part of a design scheme in which all elements bore the mark of his ‘creative genius’. There is no literal recreation of the artist’s studio within Gramercy Park, but references to the studio’s symbolic value as the locus of ‘creativity’ are encoded within Schnabel’s design. The Gramercy Park lobby, with its deep-red and ochre palette, richly textured furnishings, chandelier, dark wooden ceiling and black and white floor tiles, bore a striking resemblance to the interior featured in Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (1666), an allegorical depiction of an artist working in his studio. Although this specific work of art was not alluded to by Schnabel or Schrager in interviews, the hotelier confirmed that the rooms were designed to evoke paintings. At Gramercy Park, the lobby played a key role in communicating the identity of the hotel through its design. Customers were promised an ‘idiosyncratic, eclectic vision that offers a perfect modern alternative to the institutional approach one now finds in even the most high-end boutique design hotels’.8 The significance of Schnabel’s design lay, not so much in any technical skills demonstrated, but in the transformation of the space into a work of art through his ‘magical powers’ as an artist.9 The alignment of corporate interests with the arts resulted in the promotion of a superior aesthetic ‘taste’ designed to appeal to an affluent and arts-savvy niche market. Notes 1

2 3

4 5

Gramercy Park Hotel website: available online at: www.gramercyparkhotel.com/index.html; accessed 5 March 2011. Gramercy Park Hotel website. Aggett, M.: ‘What has influenced growth in the UK’s boutique hotel sector?’, International Journal of Contemporary Hotel Management, vol. 19, no. 2, 2007, pp. 169–77. Edition hotels website: available online at: www. editionhotels.com/; accessed 5 March 2011. Trigg, D.: ‘Furniture music, hotel lobbies, and banality: can we speak of a disinterested space?’,

6

7

8 9

Space and Culture, vol. 9, no. 4, 2006, pp. 418–28 (422). Postrel, V.: The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, Harper Collins, 2003, p. 127. Wilson, E.: ‘The bohemianisation of mass culture’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1999, pp. 11–32. Gramercy Park Hotel website. Bourdieu, P.: Sociology in Question, Sage, 1995, p. 147.

Sources Aggett, M.: ‘What Has Influenced Growth in the UK’s Boutique Hotel Sector?’, International Journal of Contemporary Hotel Management, 19 (2), 2007: 169–177. Albrecht, D.: New Hotels for Global Nomads, London: Merrell, 2002. Bourdieu, P.: Sociology in Question, London: Sage, 1995. McNeill, D.: ‘The Hotel and the City’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (3), 2008: 383–309. Postrel, V.: The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture,

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and Consciousness, New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Sturgis, A. et al.: Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, London: National Gallery Company Ltd., 2006. Trigg, D.: ‘Furniture Music, Hotel Lobbies, and Banality: Can We Speak of a Disinterested Space? Space and Culture, 9 (4), 2006: 418–428. Wilson, E.: ‘The Bohemianisation of Mass Culture’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (1), 1999: 11–32.

Paramount, New York, 1990 Interior design by Philippe Starck Mark Pimlott

1 General overview of lobby

When the New York entrepreneurs Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, founders of the famous Studio 54 nightclub, decided to create hotels, one of their stated ambitions was to provide urban interiors, extensions of the city, where culture could happen. The pair had set quite different standards for hotels: with Morgans, whose interiors were designed by Andrée Puttman (1985), and the Royalton hotel, with interiors designed by Philippe Starck (1988). Morgans was a 203 Hotel Paramount, New York

refuge of chic, delivered cheaply and acquired at a bargain; Royalton (all the hotels were known by a single name, redolent more of a club than a hotel) was to revive the idea of a literary gathering place, in the manner of the famous Algonquin Hotel (‘home’ to Dorothy Parker’s set) situated across the street from it. Royalton differed significantly from the Algonquin. Rather than invoking a salon, its lobby assumed the form of a catwalk, gawped at by a lounge set a few steps below, along its entire length. The catwalk was an invitation to glamour and spectacle, essential ingredients to all Schrager–Rubell projects, beginning with the nightclubs: Studio 54 (1977) and its reincarnation, the Palladium (1983). The latter established its creators’ taste for signature design and unabashed theatricality. Integral to the Schrager–Rubell product was the presentation of knowing, witty and ultimately artificial environments designed to attract particular tranches of pleasureseekers and celebrities. The idealised user was the representative of an increasingly visible niche market that brought its own publicity with it, sprinkling column inches, curiosity and cash over each enterprise. 2 Entrance of Paramount

204 Mark Pimlott

3 Seating area and stairs to upper level of lobby 4 Bar area in upper part of lobby 5 Detail of bar area overlooking main stairs

Paramount established something quite new. Its interior, by the french designer Phillipe Starck, sought to democratise glamour and luxury, replacing reality with fantasy and making luxury both accessible and inexpensive for an emergent and mobile style-consumer. The style of pleasure in the form of décor could be consumed at a fraction of the cost of the real pleasures of luxury hotels, which Schrager and Rubell identified as competitors. Their masterstroke was the development of a business strategy and its image – ‘cheap chic’ – through which anyone could feel famous, simply by staying in the hotel, hanging out in its lobby and consuming its style. The consistently and unusually very high occupancy rates at Paramount testified to its success. Cheap chic was glamour designed for the contemporary everyman, and the hotel, particularly its lobby, was the model of cheap chic’s principles. Located near Times Square, Paramount was in a potentially difficult location. Schrager and Rubell purchased the building – the old Paramount hotel – at a time when the neighbourhood was still a bit rough. Underneath the building were the remains of the Diamond Horseshoe, a famous nightclub run by the showman Billy Rose from 1938 to 1951. The hoteliers used the site’s myths of edginess and history. Above, existing hotel rooms were gutted, and fitted anew to create a large hotel of some 610 rooms. The gritty location was used as a foil to the new project’s theatricality, seen in gestures with myriad little episodes that began at the pavement and carried on deep within the lobby’s interior. The building’s façade was dramatically up-lit, catching the detail of its stone architecture and suggesting that great events were taking place inside, just visible through the glass screen behind the façade. Passing through the glass doors, one found oneself in a passage lined with marble tiles, 205 Hotel Paramount, New York

each of which sprouted a single red rose. The whimsy of this gesture was the prelude to the many other romantic touches of the penumbral lobby provided by the French designer, Philippe Starck. After passing through the rose-dappled entry of Paramount, one arrived at the lobby: a square, and dark, double-height room. Immediately, one had the sense that the lobby followed the rituals of its own time, the night, distinct from the rest of the city. The room gave the impression of being rather broad and low, because of the size of the plan, its breadth and its sparing use of light. Its polished anthracite-coloured walls were pierced by square openings, lined in even darker material at ground- and first-floor levels, which suggested mysterious spaces beyond. After adjusting to the lack of light, the denizens of these openings turned out to be the reception desk, the lift lobby, public restrooms, a kiosk and, above, a bar, day nursery, small gym and conference suite. The openings mastered all of them, and imported a sense of stoic grandeur. The lobby itself was populated with a large eclectic collection of designer furniture, visible in little pools of dim light. Certain pieces held court, important characters among the throng, subjecting them to a kind of social order. Jasper Morrison’s Thinking Man’s Chair (1986) and Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge chair (1986–1988) sat rather aloof in different corners of the room, inviting to the design-initiates among the guests and vaguely menacing to the novices. The menagerie of pieces lent an impression of informality and clubby-ness to the room, with the furniture, even without people playing the part of bringing the club to life. An out-of-scale black and white checkerboard carpet played Alice in Wonderland games with the room’s dimensions, and set up the room’s truly dominant, and spectacular element: a monumental staircase that led to the first floor, which was set at a slight angle to the rest of the room astride a gilded, tilted, free-standing wall, tipped backward at a slight angle, lit up by a bank of lamps concealed within a curved and modelled, Lucio Fontana-esque gash in the ceiling. In the glamorous gloom, the gilded wall was a dazzling backdrop to the whole lobby. A snaking bronze handrail hovered over the gentle run of the stair and seemed to—in a vaguely oriental way—swim across the expanse of the golden screen. Guests who dared to make the trip upstairs were transformed into glamourous performers in the Ziegfeld Folly-style. The dark zones beyond the walls of the main room contained their own minor spectacles: in the lift lobby, full-length mirrors were inscribed with illuminated letters that offered forecasts of the day’s weather; lift cars were little gems of formica panelling, each given a different colour by concealed lights; fully mirrored restrooms featured basins housed in oversized, mirror-polished stainless-steel cones engraved with baroque patterns, evoking tattoos, the Wild West and an atmosphere of sexually charged decadence. The play generated by these elements was convincing when the lobby was empty, which was very rare, but especially successful when 206 Mark Pimlott

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the lobby was full. The large number of rooms begat a large number of guests, and these were mostly people staying in the hotel for a short time for business or tourism. The ground-floor was teeming with people arriving, waiting for their fellow travellers or moving in or out of the facilities beyond the room. Each of the main room’s different components, from the furniture to the stair, gave its bustle an order, an orientation and an identity. It made the guests feel privileged, looked at, cared for. This was Paramount’s version of luxury, its great invention, achieved through illusory rather than concrete perks. The lobby was designed for visual consumption, whose pleasures would be experienced by association with its effects. In contrast, the hotel’s competitors had to provide more tangible luxuries, but the feeling of their lobbies was – with their stale and somber seating areas, all leather couches, shaded lamps and faux-gravitas – worlds apart from chimeric delights. Paramount’s lobby was ‘equipped’ with real-world facilities that buffered it from the hurly-burly of the street. These were precursors to the satellite franchise retailing outlets that have since become a commonplace of the department store, the museum and the airport. Flanking the entrance was a branch of Dean & Deluca, a stylish Manhattan delicatessen with European pretensions; the Whiskey Bar, a dark-panelled drinking den, whose hostesses’ grey uniforms seemed to be sprayed directly on their bodies; and an upmarket Italian restaurant. (The Diamond Horseshoe was never revived, despite an exploratory design to do so at the end of the 1990s, by Starck.) Until he designed the interiors of Paramount, Philippe Starck was, despite his responsibility for some iconic projects in Paris and 207 Hotel Paramount, New York

Tokyo, primarily known as a product designer. The close association formed between the designer and Ian Schrager would continue for another decade, in which Starck designed hotels in Los Angeles (Mondrian) and Miami (Delano); two in London (Saint Martins Lane and Sanderson), then San Francisco (Clift) and New York again (Hudson). Paramount was updated by Ian Schrager (Steve Rubell died in 1989) to designs by Philippe Starck at the end of the 1990s. Something of the night disappeared with the renovation. The rooms were now white and as bright as Delano’s rooms in Miami; the lobby’s eclectic cast of furniture expanded to include a long diagonal bench and some stately upright chairs upholstered with needlepoint Rottweilers; the upstairs bar was redesigned to evoke the departed Whiskey Bar, with books and standard metal chairs with Tomahawk-emblazoned slip-covers added as signs of the advancing age of its former clients. Gone with the night was the sense of an edgy Manhattan. By the end of the 1990s, the Manhattan of the beginning of the decade had disappeared. In 2008, Ian Schrager sold Paramount and Royalton to different owners, and left the company that operated the others. In his new venture with the Marriott hotel group, he has also left the genre of the boutique hotel behind, in favour of gentler settings of rest and sociability for a broader public (Public, Chicago, opening 2011). Note The author worked as a design coordinator for two Ian Schrager Hotels in London, from their conception (1997) through to their completion: St Martins Lane (1999) and Sanderson (2000), with executive architects Harper Mackay and then Ian Schrager

Design Studio. The design architects were Agence Starck and Ian Schrager Design Studio. The ‘lore’ of the Schrager hotels saturated their making and operation.

Sources Filler, Martin: ‘Evening Star’, House & Garden (USA), October 1985, p. 217. Starck, Taschen, Cologne, 1998. Huppatz, D. J.: ‘Critical Cities: Philippe Starck/Ian Schrager: Designer Hotels’, available online at: http://djhuppatz.blogspot.com/2009/06/ philippe-starckian-schrager-designer.html (accessed June 2010). ‘Ian Schrager, creator of the original boutique hotel and founder of Ian Schrager Hotels’, available online at: www.ianschragercompany.com/ian_ schrager.html (accessed June 2010). Ian Schrager Hotels: Promotional brochures for Paramount, 1996 and 1999 editions. Lambert, Bruce: ‘Neighbourhood Report: Midtown: Next Studio 54, Where are you? In the Basement’, New York Times, 2 October 1994; available online at: www.nytimes.com/1994/ 10/02/nyregion/neighborhood-report-midtownnext-studio-54-where-are-you-in-the-basement. html?ref=ianschrager (accessed June 2010).

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Paluel-Marmont, Pascal: ‘Ian Schrager’s New Hotel Concept’, available online at: www.checkyour room.com/suite-dreams-blog/2011/06/publician-schragers-new-hotel-concept/ (accessed October 2011). Preece, R. J.: ‘The problematic discourse on Philippe Starck’s Delano Hotel’, M.A. dissertation, Birmingham College of Art and Design, University of Central England, 1999. Servin, James: ‘Enter Bellhop, Stage Right’, New York Times, 7 November 1993; available online at: www.nytimes.com/1993/11/07/style/enterbellhop-stage-right.html?ref=ianschrager (accessed June 2010). Sharoff, Robert: ‘Schrager makes over a legendary Chicago Hotel’, New York Times, 13 September 2011; available online at: www.nytimes.com/ 2011/09/14/business/schrager-makes-over-alegendary-chicago-hotel.html?_r=1&ref= ianschrager (accessed June 2010).

Hotel Il Palazzo Venetian blind in Fukuoka Aldo Rossi (1986–9) Filip Geerts and S. Umberto Barbieri

1 Conceptual sketch of hotel in its urban context of public spaces

From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, Western art and architecture culture developed an increasing interest in the hitherto insularly isolated Japan. In the wake of the Arts and Crafts designreform theories, architects became intrigued by the Japanese house and garden, their uncontaminated rationality, poetic standardization, absolute simplicity, tasteful asymmetry and even implicit modernism offering an antidote to the prevailing eclecticism of the West. Modernism sought to find legitimation in the ‘honest’ constructions, ‘natural’ materiality and ‘modern’ tradition of Japan. Notably, Frank Lloyd Wright, an early 1905 visitor, went beyond collecting ukiyo-e woodblock prints and, praising the Ise Jingu˜ shrine complex, rebuilt every 20 years, or the Katsura Imperial Villa, and became active as a Western architect in the country (1917–22), overseeing the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and leaving behind four other buildings and the legacy of seven more unbuilt projects. In the footsteps of this idiosyncratic pioneer would follow a more recent wave 209 Hotel Il Palazzo, Fukuoka

2 The hotel from the opposite river front

of gaikokujin star architects, this time against the background of Japan’s economic boom of the 1980s and early 1990s. Of all places, Fukuoka (a city on Kyushu island, traditionally the archipelago’s antenna for outsider influence since the 1641 establishment of the Dutch trading outpost of Dejima in Nagasaki) became the epicentre of a construction boom that was set on importing the latest in Westernstyle architectural exploits as the complement to the proverbial realestate shopping spree of Japanese business across the globe. Aldo Rossi’s Il Palazzo Hotel (1986–9) is just one item in the candy store that is Fukuoka, accompanied by work of other foreigners – Emilio Ambasz, Jon Jerde, Cesar Pelli, Michael Graves, Oscar Tusquets Blanca, Mark Mack, Christian de Portzamparc, Steven Holl and, last but not least, Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas found, in his 1991 contribution to the Nexus World development, the improbable starting point of what 210 Filip Geerts and S. Umberto Barbieri

3 Axonometry of lobby spaces

would become his own world tour. It is around that time that he noticed Il Palazzo and used it as the only positive note at the end of a talk at the Delft University of Technology, critiquing Dutch architectural practice:

4 The public spaces around the hotel

The building is called ‘Il Palazzo’ and sits in the Japanese city Fukuoka on a kind of small ditch in a typically Japanese part of town, meaning one, totally chaotic level of bamboo. There above thrones on a pediment a building of Aldo Rossi, eight stories high and therefore in fact very low, but maximally intimidating in its detailing with a front façade of red travertine and with extremely complicated round columns. Inside this building a truly astonishing density of social elements is gathered. In the building there are, I believe, a total of twelve bars, all of which by different world-famous architects who have completely hollowed-out the building of Rossi, and there is a lobby by Rossi himself which is, alla Allessandro Mendini, a kind of parody on an English Gentlemen’s club. Even though it is from one side shocking and also not really attractive, still I have not seen in any other recent building, such an astonishing, ingenious use of the cultural and technical possibilities of a certain moment. It is a short-circuit between all kinds of givens and an especially creative and fine synthesis between all kinds of improbabilities. Despite the 211 Hotel Il Palazzo, Fukuoka

5 (facing page) From the lobby into the bar area

ambiguous feelings I have with it, I think I can say that when entering the building for the first time in recent times you truly have the feeling you are stepping into a new condition. A kind of hybrid, synthetic condition that in an astonishing way uses the possibilities available now, surrenders to it and wins by this surrender. What is needed in The Netherlands, I think, is research, or a belated confession, on such explosive sides to modernism, the modernism of participating in the maelstrom of this century, that apparently grows stronger in this fin de siècle, a participation, or at least thinking about one, to the explosion of scale, to the explosion of artificiality, to the explosion of context and to the explosion of self-control.1 Across the Naka River from Il Palazzo is the southern tip of Nakasu Island, Fukuoka’s red-light district, a mix of the standard ‘soaplands’, ‘pachinko’ and ‘massage’ parlours, like any other Japanese city of some size, together with about 2,000 restaurants, bars and ‘yatai’. These yatai (‘shop stands’) are a particularly abundant feature in the city: small, mobile food stalls that every night transform into fullfledged restaurants until early morning, each one specializing in a particular kind of street food (Mizutaki, Motsunabe, Hakata ramen, Mentaiko, but also beer, cocktails and street versions of French cuisine), catering to the city’s ‘salarymen’. The yatai are concentrated along the banks of the Naka River against the backdrop of the hyper-neon world of Hakata ward’s Nakasu Island. The festival-like nature of these transient constructs reminded Rossi of ‘small houses’ and entered his formal vocabulary, together with the beach cabins of Elba and the stands selling bright-coloured granita di limone (crushed ice with syrup) along Italian trunk roads. The yatai-condition also proved a helpful mechanism to understand the complexity of a hotel project featuring not only a fusion of East and West, but also a postmodern redefinition of the relationship between building and interior spaces. A one-storey base extends to a typically Japanese alley-like street parallel to the river, a row of low-rise buildings separating the site from the actual waterfront. There is no waterfront as such, apart from the backs of these low-rise structures on top of the concrete riverbank. The palazzo does not sit on the water, as in Venice, nor on a river walk, as would be expected. Still, the hotel is designed as if it were. The base creates the podium for a seven-storey monumental slab set back from the alley, with its narrow side facing it. Steps on both sides of a central passage into the plinth lead up to a plaza on top. What usually is the nondescript, blind, ‘short’ side of a typical hotel slab, here genially becomes the building’s face, the front. What essentially still is a relatively low hotel slab looks as if it is a tower. The façade on the plaza is a windowless monument, with no other function than to give an appropriate presence on the plaza, the riverfront and the city beyond: a screen of eight red Persian-travertine columns and an abstract articulation of the seven hotel floors by green copper-sheathed lintels 212 Filip Geerts and S. Umberto Barbieri

213 Hotel Il Palazzo, Fukuoka

6 From the lobby into the restaurant area

in front of the red-brick tiles, topped of by the massive cornice. The windows of the sixty-two hotel rooms are revealed in a rigid rhythm on the two, plain red-brick, lateral façades. What is practically the squareshaped end lot of a deep and narrow city block between the river and the main avenue of the Haruyoshi section of Chuo ward becomes the site for the rotation of the traditional hotel type on its lot. Two separate buildings, each with two bars inside, are symmetrically positioned on both sides left over by the hotel block on its plinth. The narrow alleys between the hotel plinth and both buildings replicate the alleys of the area and look, especially at night when artificially lit, like a mix between a De Chirico painting and a Noh-theatre stage set. Each of the annex buildings is split in two by means of a double-height, skylit centre portion, connecting the existing alleys with the project ones and providing access to the bars, and featuring a double stair leading to a bridge over the new alley onto the plaza plinth with the hotel. The passageways are crowned by huge Rossi-designed ‘Memento’ wallclocks. One of the bars, El Dorado, designed by Aldo Rossi with Morris Adjmi, features a gold-leafed replica of the hotel’s landmark façade as a reminder and as a bottle rack behind the bar counter. The other section of the same building contains another double-height bar: Gaetano Pesce’s El Liston. The twin-bar building on the other side features OБЛOMOBA2 by Shiro Kuramata and Zibibbo by Ettore Sottsass. When able to escape the lure of these joints, one enters the hotel, after climbing the stairs from the Romano–Sucuro travertine-paved plaza into the lobby. Or, instead, one can loose oneself in the central passage in-between the stairs to end up inside the plinth, only to find another temptation: enter the world of the Alfredo Arribas-designed Barna Crossing discotheque, conceived as a ‘culture resort’ and ‘neuropleasure city’, occupying the ground-floor and a nine-metre, doubleheight space in the cellar. Once in the hotel lobby, the reception is on the left, with some seating to the right of the first set of two monumental onyx-terrazzo-finished columns (articulated with a slightly Japanese Torii-like touch) framing the central axis, through the elevator bay into the back section, with a seventy-seven-seat restaurant on the left separated by the kitchen block from the main Rossidesigned quince-wood bar on the right. Single (sixteen) and twin (twenty-eight) rooms occupy the first four floors. The seventh floor is for Japanese-style rooms (single, twin and suite rooms with tatami floors and shoji screens). The top floor is again Western-style, with the five double rooms, two suites and two more singles. The project for the hotel is of particular relevance considering the relationship of architecture with the design of interior spaces. Rossi designed the building and some of the interior, including the lobby floor, with the rest of the spaces filled by a plethora of interior designers. The architecture of the building, as if the display case for the interior designers’ ideas, provides a rigid, relatively simple shell for an exuberant interior world. The whole is a postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk of self-contained interior spaces by both Japanese and foreign creative 214 Filip Geerts and S. Umberto Barbieri

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talent of that moment. The designer in charge of the hotel and the restaurant, Shigeru Uchida, argues that the project came at a time when interior design became pitted against the concerns of the individual rather than a social system. The hotel became the experimentation ground, both for this new condition (echoing the Koolhaas analysis of the project), as well as for the redefinition of the territory of both the architect and of the interior designer. Rossi cited Michelangelo and Brunelleschi as examples to his colleagues in order to invite a series of ‘interior’ interpretations of his self-evident architectural framework. The multiple authorship therefore becomes an essential component in the successful mimetic continuity of the project’s monument-on-plinth architecture-of-the-city meets intricate alley-fabric cum programmatic excess of the city. The layout of the plot, with the alleys, makes the project literally a piece of city. Il Palazzo, recently renovated and reopened again in 2010, rises above the banks of the Naka River as a red beacon: a mothership-yatai. If anything, the Haruyoshi section of Chuo ward has become more like Nakasu across the river since 1987, when the developers and planners heralded the hotel as the catalyst for neighbourhood transformation. The hotel and its spatial thresholds, in a streetscape animated by ‘love hotels’ with hourly rooms, could not be more different from John Jerde’s Canal City Mall on the other side of Nakasu, which closes at a decent hour and where respectable people can retreat into the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Il Palazzo is both graceful and compassionate: robustly towering above the city and accommodating the city’s transgressions 215 Hotel Il Palazzo, Fukuoka

on its doorstep. Awarded ‘Best Architecture’ in 1991 by the City of Fukuoka, and, in November 2003, still listed by Travel + Leisure magazine in its global ‘Top Ten: Space Odyssey’ as one of ten hotels ‘where style meets substance’, among such jewels as the New York City Four Seasons, the Mexico City Hotel Camino Real, Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Greywalls Hotel in Scotland and the Fontainebleau Miami, it remains a powerful fixture in the cityscape. Il Palazzo also managed to enter Japanese culture as the name of the leader of the secret Across organization bent on world domination, a character of the Excel Saga Manga and anime by Rikdo Koshi, set in a fictitious Fukuoka. East and West meet in hotel lobbies all the time, but, in Rossi’s Fukuoka lobby, this is against the backdrop of a rational eclecticism striking back with a vengeance and precision: explosive modernism indeed. And, if one wants some of the implicit modernism so adored by early Western Japanophiles, one can always try the seventh floor.

Notes 1

2

Sources

Koolhaas, Rem: (no title), in: Hoe modern is de Nederlandse architectuur?, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1990, pp. 19–20. Oblomov is the main character of the 1859 homonymous novel by Ivan Goncharov, the epitome of the superfluous young man incapable of decision.

Adjmi, M. (Ed.) Aldo Rossi: Architecture, 1981–1991, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991. © 1991 Studio di Architettura. Stein, K. D.: ‘Tower of power’, Architectural Record, vol. 178, no.6, 1990: p. 70. Zermani, P.: Il palazzo e l’ordine, Aldo Rossi, Hotel Palazzo a Fukuoka, Materia, no. 4., 1990.

216 Filip Geerts and S. Umberto Barbieri

The Zeebrugge Ferry Terminal, OMA Architecture after the crisis of the whole Lara Schrijver

1 General view of lobby with cinema, waiting areas and parking space

In the early 1990s, Koolhaas positioned the Zeebrugge Sea Ferry Terminal as one of three pivotal competition projects from the summer of 1989 that alerted the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) to the growing presence of a metropolitan culture of congestion embedded within the traditional European city. The other two projects were the Zentrum fur Kunst- und Medientechnologie, in Karlsruhe (ZKM), and the Très Grand Bibliothèque, in Paris (TGB).1 Work on the three competitions was done simultaneously and led to discussions on the main ideas of all three designs by the teams involved.2 Although the efforts of the different design teams resulted in prizes and commendations, all three projects remained unrealized. The intellectual fruits of the work were to become evident later, as the summer of 1989 proved to be relevant to the developing concept of Bigness.3 In this light, the Zeebrugge project stands out, as it is the least obviously metropolitan project. It is located along the Belgian coast, 217 Hotel Seaterminal, Zeebrugge

on a site primarily defined by emptiness, an industrial harbor and the horizon. The brief also contained an element of representation: the client sought a means to present ferry travel as pleasurable and exciting, in order to compete with the train travel that had become a viable alternative owing to the newly finished tunnel under the English Channel. This was to be embodied in the new sea-ferry terminal, which would contain not only the logistics of ferry transport, but also offices and leisure facilities such as a hotel and a casino. It is in this combination of a complex spatial organization with an explicitly symbolic component—not necessarily related to the functional program—that Zeebrugge contributed to the subsequent notion of Bigness as a late twentieth-century condition. The traditionally cohesive urban and architectural spaces seemed increasingly inappropriate to the contemporary urban domain, which was marked by dispersion and heterogeneity. Koolhaas saw this transforming context as offering new possibilities for architecture. All three competition projects explore this changing metropolitan condition. The notion of Bigness, as a “post-architectural” concept derived from the practice of architecture, rethinks the form and space of the public in the city. In the face of a dwindling coherence of the public realm, Bigness both celebrates the heterogeneity of the contemporary metropolis and offers a glimpse of an underlying cohesion. The internalized public space of Zeebrugge, a container for contradictory and fragmented program elements, uses the insights Koolhaas gained from Manhattan in order to gaze forward to a brave new future for a fading European city. The envisioned size of the ferry terminal already prefigures the later comment on scale in the essay “Bigness”—when the building grows so large that it becomes urban rather than architectural. This necessitates a rethinking of the role of its public spaces.4 As the building approaches the scale of the urban, its interior spaces no longer figure as an addition to the public streets of the city, but rather function as the primary public domain, now enclosed within the building. At its base, the ferry terminal is defined more or less functionally, and becomes more refined on its way up. Roughly the lower half of the building is utilitarian, containing access and traffic facilities and then parking. Where the main utilitarian elements end, the spiral shape turns into a restaurant, beginning as a “rough restaurant for truckers,” but becoming more luxurious as it continues upwards. Also, this is the first moment, in a building which is otherwise very closed, that the public is allowed to enjoy the view and be confronted with both the expanse of the water and the possibility of looking back at the Belgian coast.5 This arrangement runs counter to the traditional order of public space, from open to progressive enclosure. Here, the internal and 218 Lara Schrijver

2 View from the lobby towards the North Sea

utilitarian focus opens up to the panoramic view on level five, with the glazing spiraling around the entire public hall, a large space at the sixth level encircling a void. This hall, at the top of the escalators, contains the service counters, a restaurant and cafeteria, and a balcony. Level seven maintains a view out past the cinema screen suspended in the central void and the restaurant. On the top floor, level nine, the view opens out over the coast, reminiscent of a skyscraper penthouse: oriented not on the building, but rather on the sky and, in this case, the sea. These three independent public spaces—the lobby, the chasm and the ‘penthouse’—are both composite and individual. Although the lobby, chasm and roof can be seen separately, together they perform as a social condensor, recalling the trajectory of the bachelors in the Downtown Athletic Club. In Delirious New York, Koolhaas describes the transformation on the way up, with its various programmatic elements and the role of the elevator within this.6 The ferry terminal follows a similar trajectory of increasing sophistication, positioning the public space above the utilitarian floors of cargo and passenger transfer. The three elements work together to expose the building (the chasm), 219 Hotel Seaterminal, Zeebrugge

3 View from the parking areas into the lobby

to enforce a trajectory of the social condensor (from access to lobby to view) and to exhibit an increasing refinement in the elements of our cities—from the industrial (trucks, ferry and bus terminals) to postindustrial pleasurescapes (casino, cinema, hotel). This condensed stacking of (often contradictory) programs is a prerequisite for the congestion underlying the late-twentieth-century city. Combining utilitarian elements and leisure, the public space resolves in the spectacle of the horizon and coastline, visible from its penthouse swimming pool.7 The contrast between internal focus (the chasm and the internal program) and views out (lobby and penthouse) reinforces the distinction between inside and outside that is central to a rethinking of architectural representation, both in Delirious New York (in the “lobotomy” and “vertical schism”) and in the notion of Bigness (where the distance between core and envelope demands dissociation between façade and interior).8 At the same time, the chasm reclaims the importance of architecture by inserting two extensive escalators at the bottom, contradicting the purely technical connection of the elevator in the Downtown Athletic Club.9 In the central void of the ferry terminal, the escalators span four levels, laying bare the lower, utilitarian floors, and the chasm itself exhibiting the strata of different spaces. This is the later notion of Bigness on display, perhaps even dissected. The various spaces, from office to hotel and lobby, from passenger terminals to penthouse, are all present as fragments in the composite void at the heart of the terminal. The coexistence of these autonomous elements calls to mind O. M. Ungers’ ideas on the “city within the city,” to which Koolhaas was a key contributor.10 Although the congested energy of the internal void is unmistakable, it is cloaked by the smooth skin of the exterior. The transparent sections allow views out to the surroundings, or in to the metropolitan heart, and yet the exterior envelope remains a singular form, containing (constraining) the city within it. This formal component is easily overlooked in the context of Bigness, where scale and the complexity of the city seem central, and yet the original essay is also unmistakably outspoken on the role of the formal in the collective imagination. Although the very scale of Bigness renders the tools of architecture useless, Koolhaas suggests that its size also transforms our aesthetic valuation. In contrast to the clarity of traditional representation, the notion of Bigness seeks a way to gather the many heterogeneous fragments of an individualized public domain and “reconstitute” a collective. In that context, a theory of Bigness should maybe talk about the “new whole”—the whole after the crisis of the whole, a whole based no longer on exclusion or homogeneity but on cultivating the uncontrollable—a whole that does not pretend to control beyond the range of a single perspective.11 220 Lara Schrijver

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This transformed collective of individuals and their presence as an aggregate appeals to the symbolic elements identified in Delirious New York, the objects that unconsciously mold collective dreams.12 This position embraces disparity, heterogeneity and singularity as contributions to the “new whole,” describing: a generic urban condition that is already with us, an abstraction that does not extract geometric forms or general types out of impurities or particularities but that rather, through great effort, scrapes into existence light new singularities and holds them in tension.13 As the Zeebrugge project demonstrates, heterogeneity does not eliminate a need for the formal, but rather sees a new role for it, no longer based on traditional representation. Although the project brief approached it from a more conventional standpoint, proposing the terminal as an icon for sea travel, both the site and the brief encouraged an exploration of form.14 As suggested later in “Bigness”, the form became an independent concern not despite, but rather because of, its scale. Koolhaas characterizes the brief as so complex that we found ourselves confronted with very artistic choices in that the only judgment we could make was no longer functionally based, because the problem was too complex to be analyzed in a rational manner. It was a myth that had to be assembled. The design team spent a significant amount of time in the office discussing the merits of the overall form of the building (“whether one shape was more beautiful than another”).15 This begs the comparison with Ungers’ notion of Grossform, in which form plays an important role in facilitating unforeseeable developments by creating a strong framework for the life within architecture to flourish.16 The resulting form of the ferry terminal is presented as a formal gesture without familiar referent, or what Somol calls a “precise but vague silhouette.”17 It is described as evoking a spectrum of associations rather than “content,” as traditional representation might. It suggests maritime references such as a bollard (used for mooring a boat) or a lighthouse, yet might just as easily be seen as a motorcycle helmet. In this sense, it performs as a perfect contemporary icon. It is a referent-free form (ready to be filled in with personal and individual associations) that can also be tagged with more easily identifiable images such as those related to the sea, and yet also contains an underlying association with culturally significant productions. A knowledge of precedents from within the discipline is visible in the similarities to the Globe Tower of Coney Island, in the simple geometry of a cone crossed with a sphere, but also in the references to the archetype of the needle and the sphere, as for example in the Lenin Institute by Leonidov.18 222 Lara Schrijver

scale 1:500

Seaterminal – Zeebrugge, Belgium – Rem Koolhaas

5 Section

223 Hotel Seaterminal, Zeebrugge

The “precise but vague silhouette” of Zeebrugge embodies the connection between Delirious New York and Bigness. The seminal notion of the “lobotomy” in Delirious New York, describing the separation between outside and inside of a building, has now grown into a central question of external form. If the separation is complete, then there remains no need (indeed, not even the possibility) to represent the inner workings of a building. This introduces a level of formal freedom that runs counter to the modernist ideals of expressing the “essence” of a building. Perhaps this essence can no longer be captured, but is rather a composite image of various perceptions, views and fragments, which must be reconstituted individually by the users of the building. The Zeebrugge solution, then, suggests that a strong form with few direct referents might be a way to allow for multiple readings and recombinations. At the same time, allowing simple referents (a buoy, a helmet, a bollard) also triggers the immediate identification with the building, without constraining it to a received iconographic interpretation. By subsequently destabilizing these references in the composite void inside, the building again reconfigures its own image. The strength of OMA has lain in an ability to give form to ideas, and conceptually to explore simple facts of practice. In this, the office, and the work of Koolhaas, has demonstrated some of the unique qualities of architecture. Precisely in the production of both words and images, it bridges the intellectual endeavor of the discipline and the public imagination. The most culturally significant products of architecture have stood the test of many centuries. Whether we see them as unique products of their time or as expressions of a universal sense of beauty, their appeal to more than the merely individual seems to agree with Koolhaas’s idea that there is some kind of “whole after the crisis of the whole” (or perhaps despite it). In hindsight, Zeebrugge might be the design equivalent of Delirious New York, which grew out of the desire to “write a book on architecture without the traditional architectural vocabulary.”19 Paradoxically, by refusing the traditional architectural vocabulary, the work not only contributes more fundamental insights into the discipline of architecture, but it also shows Koolhaas to be, more than anything, an architect.

224 Lara Schrijver

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

Kwinter, Sanford (Ed.): Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, Houston: Rice University School of Architecture, and New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1996. In this publication of a 1991 lecture given at the Rice School of Architecture, he refers to these three as projects “whose programs themselves made us aware of certain connections, of certain almost revolutionary conditions, that were beginning to take place in Europe as a whole” (p. 18). Of the three projects, the Très Grand Bibliothèque was the largest by far: 250,000 m2, which is noted in S,M,L,XL as “13 × ZKM, 10 × Zeebrugge” (p. 608). Nevertheless, the size of the program at Zeebrugge was enough already to suggest a different approach. The office was restructured into design teams for the competitions, and friends and former employees were asked to collaborate. See also: Lootsma, Bart and Mariette van Straalen: “De opdrachtgever als visionair: Koolhaas blaast de klassieke rol van de architect opnieuw leven in,” Archis 5, May 1990, pp. 36–45. Koolhaas later referred to the increased teamwork as a way to avoid the “insipient mania of loneliness” of the architect. Zaera-Polo, Alejandro: “Finding freedoms: conversations with Rem Koolhaas,” El Croquis, 53, Rem Koolhaas—OMA 1987–92, 1992, pp. 6–31. There was a very slow awakening to first the existence, then the potential, of Bigness. I have to say that it was actually the practice of architecture—very rarely intellectually stimulating, because of its very difficulty—that gradually imposed a realization upon us: projects like Zeebrugge, the TGB, Karlsruhe, Lille, all had as a common denominator a large scale, accumulations not only of one big program but of clusters of diversity, and a political importance that required making very visible statements and changing conditions emphatically. (Rajchman, John: “Thinking big,” Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas—interview, ArtForum, vol. 33, December 1994, available online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/ is_n4_v33/ai_16547724/pg_6/) The essay on Bigness was published in 1994 as: Koolhaas, Rem: “Bigness: the problem of large,” Wiederhall, 17, 1994, pp. 32–3. Koolhaas, Rem: “Bigness, or the problem of large,” Wiederhall, 17, 1994, pp. 32–3. Kwinter, Sanford (Ed.): Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with students, Houston: Rice

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

University School of Architecture, and New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p. 21. Koolhaas, Rem: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994 (orig: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 152–9. “Working Babel” was the theme of the submission—not the original tower of chaos and power, but a tower that “effortlessly swallows, entertains, and processes the travelling masses”: “Working Babel” in: Rem Koolhaas: S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995, p. 581. Koolhaas, Rem: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994 [orig: Oxford University Press, 1978]), pp.100–107. Koolhaas, Rem: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994 (orig.: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 82, 157. In “Bigness, or the problem of large,” Koolhaas refers to the elevator as rendering “null and void the classical repertoire of architecture.” He also notes “its ability to mechanically establish connections without any recourse to architecture”: Kwinter, Sanford (Ed.): Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, Houston: Rice University School of Architecture, and New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p. 17. As an emphatically architectural intervention, the escalators at the core of the chasm in Zeebrugge counteract this purely mechanical connection. Roberto Gargiani refers to Ungers’ alternative formulations of the same principle: the “house within the house” and the “doll within the doll”: Gargiani, Roberto: Rem Koolhaas, OMA: The Construction of Merveilles, Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2008, pp. 166–7. In an earlier publication, I have noted the parallels between the “city within the city” and Bigness: Schrijver, Lara: “The archipelago city: piecing together collectivities,” OASE, 71, Urban Formation and Collective Spaces, 2008, pp. 18–36. Whereas Gargiani argues that the difference with Ungers is that Koolhaas does not seek an overarching geometric coherence to the various pieces, I would argue that it is the external form, the shell itself, that offers coherence, as a Grossform. Rajchman, John: “Thinking big,” Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas—interview, ArtForum, vol. 33, December 1994; available online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_ n4_v33/ai_16547724/; quote from p. 7. This also recalls the description of the Très Grand Bibliothèque in S,M,L,XL, which notes that:

225 Hotel Seaterminal, Zeebrugge

13

14

“architecture’s last function will be the creation of the symbolic spaces that accommodate the persistent desire for collectivity” (S,M,L,XL, p. 604). Rajchman, John: “Thinking big,” Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas—interview, ArtForum, vol. 33, December 1994, p. 6; available online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_ n4_v33/ai_16547724/pg_6/. In this context, it is of interest to note the importance of the contradictory singularities in particular, which play an important role in the work of both Koolhaas and O. M. Ungers. See also: Schrijver, Lara: “OMA as tribute to OMU: exploring resonances in the wok of Koolhaas and Ungers,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 13, no. 3, 2008, pp. 235–61. “Working Babel” in: Koolhaas, Rem: S,M.L.XL, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995, pp. 579–601. The significance of the Zeebrugge project in its formal qualities was also noted in: Fisher, Thomas: “Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture explore the arbitrariness of form in these three recent projects,” Progressive Architecture, vol. 4, April 1990, pp. 123–5; and in: Lootsma, Bart, and Mariëtte van Stralen: “De opdrachtgever als visionair: Koolhaas blast de klassieke rol van de architect nieuw leven in,” Archis, vol. 5, May 1990,

15 16

17

18

19

pp. 36–45. The article by Lootsma and Van Stralen in particular notes the central role of a “new aesthetic” in the Zeebrugge project. Rem Koolhaas: Conversations With Students, p. 20. Ungers, O. M.: “Grossformen im Wohnungsbau,” Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur, vol. 5, December 1966. Robert Somol describes this as “imagable but without reference”: Somol, Robert E.: “Green dots 101,” Hunch, vol. 11, Rethinking Representation, Winter 2006–7, pp. 28–37. Gargiani describes the terminal as a reworking of the Globe Tower (also a crossing between ball and cone): Gargiani, R.: Rem Koolhaas, OMA: The Construction of Merveilles, Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2008, pp. 166–7. The needle and the sphere figure throughout Delirious New York. In 1981, Koolhaas published a small book on the work of Leonidov together with Gerrit Oorthuys, confirming his familiarity with the work: Koolhaas, R. and G. Oorthuys: Ivan Leonidov, New York: Rizzoli and Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 8, 1981; foreword by Kenneth Frampton. Bollerey, Franziska: “. . . immer wieder eine Mischung von Verführung und Ungenießbarkeit ins Spiel bringen,” interview with Rem Koolhaas, Bauwelt, vol. 17/18, 1987, pp. 627–33.

Sources Bekaert, G.: Sea Trade Center Zeebrugge, Antwerpen, Standaard, 2009.

226 Lara Schrijver

Koolhaas, R.: S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995.

CUBE Hotel, Tröpolach An ultimate home base and stagescape of the alpine event society Michael Zinganel

1 High lobby with bar in the centre, CUBE 2/3

CUBE 1: Tröpolach, Austria, 2004 Architects: Novaron, St Gallen Switzerland CUBE 2: Savognin, Switzerland, 2005 CUBE 3: Biberwier-Lermoos, Austria, 2007 Architects: Baumschlager & Eberle, Vienna, Austria

The Cube Hotel is considered to be the prototype for a new design and budget hotel chain in the Alpine leisure landscape, aimed at young, or young-at-heart, sports enthusiasts, who are busy exercising all day long on the mountain slopes – either on snowboards, skis, mountain bikes or other contemporary, fun equipment. Therefore, the designers 227 CUBE Hotel, Tröpolach

suggested that these clients would need only quite Spartan accommodation, with direct access to the mountain and a highly functional base for hiring or storing – perhaps even repairing – their sports equipment. However, the hotel should not only meet its customers’ need for sports recreation, but also offer them a stage on which to pose in front of, gaze at, communicate and celebrate with each other. From the outside, the hotel is unpretentious but striking: the simple form of the cube is covered by a double-layer, zinced grid, and a membrane of polycarbonate plates works as a playful filter and frames the views from inside and outside. There is no special design for a privileged gaze towards the mountains, because guests are assumed to have experienced the Alpine landscape themselves during the day. Rather, everything is oriented with regard to a direct form of communication inside. Its interior offers surprising spatial qualities and attractions. Like John Portman’s famous Hyatt Hotels, cited by Frederick Jameson as the synonym for postmodern life,1 the lobby of the Cube is dominated by a four-to-five-storey-high central atrium, with galleries around its circumference. Whereas Portman’s lobbies are characterized by numerous exposed glass lifts moving up and down beside many more floors, the miniature-sized lobby of the Cube is characterized by a system of two intertwined ramps leading from one floor to another – an obvious reference to Le Corbusier, but much more to modern shopping-mall and airport-terminal design, as, in the visual axis of the two ramps, double LCD screens are installed on the opposite ramp. Before these ramps reach the ground floor, one of them extends itself to become a kind of staircase landscape, of considerable depth, that could serve as a lounge, a platform or even as a stage. It is oriented towards the communication area winding around the atrium. There is a reception desk, a 24-hour bar and a restaurant with a 24-hour breakfast service, and the visual axis leads to the fireplace room, where the fireplace competes with a large screen for sports or music broadcasts. In the best of all cases, ‘Best of the day’ shots will be screened, pictures of what has happened in the real world of the mountain, and the sporty, open-minded actors – the clients of the hotel – will become TV heroes just for one day. The materials in the hall are quite rough: grey, sanded floor screed and Béton brut, with exposed cable and ventilation funnels, and coated plywood panels usually used for concrete formwork are ‘pimped’ with permanent light installations, sound and visuals. Translucent colouredglass panels, lit from the back, cover each pillar in the lobby and each entrance to the individual rooms from the galleries. The minimalism and roughness are quite innovative compared with the otherwise cosy hotel interiors of the Alpine leisure landscape. Much more innovative, however, are the strategies to enable and enhance communication at almost every level and intensity. 228 Michael Zinganel

2 CUBE Hotel in its surrounding ski slopes, CUBE 1 3 High lobby with entertainment area in the basement, CUBE 1

Super-stages Communication starts in the gallery in front of one’s own room: socalled ‘showrooms’ are placed in between the individual rooms and the galleries. Translucent glass panes work as coloured filters for airconditioned rooms where shoes and clothes can be dried, and the precious sports equipment – snowboards in winter, mountain bikes in summer – can be stored, repaired and displayed to the other hotel guests. Of course, the ramps are designed to encourage people to walk up and down carrying their own equipment. One could even go up and down by bicycle or skateboard. This may not always be possible, because of the ramp’s inclination and narrowness, but it is a great means of self-representation, as the sculpturally impressive ramps are visible from all the galleries and the seats on the first floor. The lobby finally ends in the basement – beneath the platform – forming a peculiar, residual room that contains consoles. This residual room is also the internal foyer for a giant club, for a maximum of 1,800 people, allowing self-expression and self-representation to culminate in the fluidity of staged communicative scenes. It seems as if the Cube is a spatial interpretation of several, very up-to-date, postmodern theories on leisure and identity politics. It offers a set of stages to individuals to exercise varying identities, to enact their own asymmetrical performances, to show their consumer items and to find an audience for all this whose attention is heightened because it is on holiday as well. 229 CUBE Hotel, Tröpolach

4 View from the ramps towards gallery and rooms and lounge area of lobby with terraces, CUBE 1 (facing page) 5 View of lounge area, CUBE 2/3

The first Cube Hotel was realized in 2004 right on the huge parking lot of an Alpine cable-car station near the village of Tröpolach, close to the Austrian–Italian border. It was developed by the hotel chain’s founder and operator, Rudolf Tucek, and young architects Novaron, from St Gallen, Switzerland, some of whom were still working with Baumschlager & Eberle at the same time. The second Cube Hotel was opened in Savognin, Switzerland, in 2005, and the third in Biberwier-Lermoos in Tyrol, Austria, in 2007. For these hotels, the much more famous outfit Baumschlager & Eberle was commissioned to redesign the first version, which already contained all the key attractions. Baumschlager & Eberle and its in-house architects transformed the rather rough design into a slightly more elegant one: they replaced the wide platform in the central hall

230 Michael Zinganel

0 0

scale 1:500

5 1

10 2

3

15 ft 4

5 m

Cube Hotel – Baumschlager Eberle

6 Section and ground-floor, CUBE 2/3

with a striking, freestanding bar element, which looks like one from any recently refurbished international airport. Finally, they also opened the formerly introverted hotel to the landscape by designing a roof terrace. The reason for changing the architects, therefore, was the owner’s and operator’s intention of simply cross-branding with the brand names of famous architects, their marketing power and cultural capital – which became popular within the tourism industry as well – but also with the new architects’ expertise displayed in rebuilding Vienna Airport. Therefore, the connotations of airport lounges and hallways in the design of the lobby of the new hotel became even more obvious: the ‘non place’ par excellence is the fun place of the future. Note 1

Fredric Jameson: ‘The cultural logic of late capitalism’, in Jameson, Fredric: Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism, Duke UP, 1991.

231 CUBE Hotel, Tröpolach

Bibliography

Books Abraben, E.: Resort Hotels: Planning and Management, New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1965. Albrecht, Donald: New Hotels for Global Nomads, London: Merrell Publishers, 2002. Baeder, John: Gas, Food, and Lodging, New York: Abeville Press, 1982. Berens, Carol: Hotel Bars and Lobbies, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. Binney, Marcus: The Ritz Hotel London, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Boniface, Priscilla: Hotels and Restaurants 1830 to the Present Day, London: Batsford, 1981. Borras, Montse: Hotel Spaces, Mass: Rockport, 2008. Braden, Susan R.: The Architecture of Leisure: The Florida Resort Hotels of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2002. Cary, James: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, New York: Dover, 1989. Cathcart Borer, Mary: The British Hotel Through the Ages, London: Lutterworth Press, 1972. Denby, Elaine: Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion: An Architectural and Social History, London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Donzel, Catherine, Gregory, Alexis and Walter, Marc: Grand American Hotels, London: Thames & Hudson, 1989. D’Ormesson, Jean (Ed.): Grand Hotel – The Golden Age of Palace Hotels, An Architectural and Social History, London: Chartwell, 1984. Frishauer, Willi: The Grand Hotels of Europe, New York: CowardMcCann, 1965. Garrard Lowe, David: Beaux Arts New York, New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1998. Gogarty, Amy: ‘New craft in old spaces: artist-designed rooms at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel’, in: Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855–2005, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Groth, Paul: Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, California: University of California Press, 1994. Guise, Barry and Brook, Pam: The Midland Hotel: Morecombe’s White Hope, Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2008. Ingram, Paul: The Rise of Hotel Chains in the United States, 1896–1980, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. Koch, Alexander: Hotels / Restaurants, Café- Und Barräume, Stuttgart: A. Koch, 1951. Lamonaca, Marianne and Mogul, Jonathan (Eds.): Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze and Weaver, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Lapidus, Morris: An Architecture of Joy, Miami: E. A. Seemann, 1979. Lapidus, Morris: Too Much is Never Enough: An Autobiography, New York: Rizzoli, 1996. Limerick, Jeffrey: America’s Grand Resort Hotels, New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. 233 Bibliography

Ludy, Robert Borneman: Historic Hotels of the World, Philadelphia: David McKay Co., 1927. Massingberd, Hugh and Watkin, David: The London Ritz: A Social and Architectural History, London: Aurum, 1989. Matthew, Christopher: A Different World: Stories of Great Hotels, London: Paddington Press Ltd, 1976. Meade, Martin: Grand Oriental Hotels, London: Dent, 1987. Reynolds, Donald Martin: The Architecture of New York City: Histories and Views of Important Structures, Sites, and Symbols, New York: Macmillan, 1984. Rubinstein, Hilary: Hotels and Inns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Sandoval-Strausz, A. K.: Hotel: An American History, London: Yale University Press, 2007. Sherman, Rachel: Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, London: UCP, 2007. Taylor, Derek and Bush, David: The Golden Age of British Hotels, London: Northwood Publications, 1974. Tolles, Bryant Franklin: Resort Hotels of the Adirondacks: The Architecture of a Summer Paradise, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2003. Watkins, David: Grand Hotel: The Golden Age of Palace Hotels, An Architectural and Social History, London: Dent, 1984. Wharton, Annabel Jane: Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. White, Arthur: Palaces of the People: A Social History of Commercial Hospitality, London: Rapp and Whiting, 1968. Wilson, Richard (Ed.): Victorian Resorts and Hotels: Essays from a Victorian Society Autumn Symposium, Philadelphia: The Victorian Society in America, 1982. Journal articles Brucken, Carolyn: ‘In the public eye: women and the American luxury hotel’, Winterthur Portfolio, 31 (4), 1996: 203–20. Evans, Nancy Goyne: ‘The Sans Souci, a fashionable resort hotel in Ballston Spa’, Winterthur Portfolio, 6, 1970: 111–26. Gibson, Sarah: ‘Accomodating strangers: British hospitality and the asylum hotel debate’, Journal for Cultural Research, 7 (4), 2003: 367–86. Hayner, Norman S.: ‘Hotel life and personality’, The American Journal of Sociology, 33 (5), 1928: 784–95. Knapp, Frederic: ‘The Sheraton Palace: preserving the past, positioning for the future’, The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 32 (4), 1991: 13–23. Koprince, Susan: ‘Edith Wharton’s hotels’, Massachusetts Studies in English, 10, 1985: 12–23.

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McNeill, Donald: ‘The hotel and the city’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (3), 2008: 383–98. Matthias, Bettina: ‘A home away from home? The hotel as space of emancipation in early twentieth century Austrian bourgeois literature’, German Studies Review, 27 (2), 2004: 325–40. Price, Matlock: ‘Great modern hotels of America, their leadership in architecture and interior decoration: the Los Angeles Biltmore’, Arts and Decoration, 21, 1924: 25–8. Raitz, Karl B. and Jones, John Paul: ‘The city hotel as landscape artifact and community symbol’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 9 (1), 1988: 17–36. Tang, T. C.: ‘The Shophouse Hotel: vernacular heritage in a creative city’, Urban Studies, 46 (2), 2009: 341–67. Guides London (Illustrated) A Complete Guide to The Places of Amusement, Objects of Interest, Parks, Clubs, Markets, Docks, Principal Railway Routes, Leading Hotels . . ., London: Henry Herbert & Co. Publishers, 1881. Specific hotel articles ‘Ambassador Hotel’, American Architect, 5 August 1928: 165. ‘Havana Hilton’, Interiors, August 1958: 66. ‘Hotels from grand to fabulous’, Architectural Review, September 1960: 240. ‘Hotels and motels’, Interiors, November 1958: 86. ‘The influence of various styles on the design of a modern apartment hotel’, The American Architect, 20 January 1928: 109. ‘Morecombe Hotel: the L.M.S as Maecenas’, Country Life, November 1933. Colby, Reginald: ‘London’s Palm Court Hotels’, Country Life, 16 April 1964: 896. Curtis, Wayne: ‘The Plaza checks out: converting New York’s most famous hotel marks the end of a storied past’, Preservation, 57 (6), 2005: 22–7. Davey, Peter: ‘Morecambe and modernity: Union North and Avanti Architects help revive Morecambe’s Midland Hotel for developer/hotelier, Urban Splash’, Architectural Review, 224 (1339), 2008: 76–81. Jen, Leslie: ‘Checking in: the formally downbeat Gladstone Hotel invites the art and design community to give it more than just a facelift’, Canadian Architect, 50 (9), 2005: 24–9. Klein, Dan: ‘A twenties affair: the Park Lane Hotel’, Connoisseur, 208 (836), 1981: 145–7. Page, Marion: ‘Hotel Plaza, “Manhattan’s proud memento of Edwardian elegance”: an historical outline from its inception in 1907’, Interiors, April 1959: 128–33.

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Saint, Andrew: ‘Evolution of a hotel interior: Claridge’s, London II’, Country Life, 170 (4376), 1981: 36–40. Young, Lucie: ‘Miami Moderne: funky design innovations have restored the dignity to a clutch of decaying Deco hotels in Miami’, Designer’s Journal, 81, 1992: 22–6.

236 Bibliography

Index Page numbers in italics denote an illustration

accommodation, history of 3–18 Adelphi Hotel (Liverpool) 17 Adjmi, Morris 214 Adlon Hotel (Berlin) 17 Adorno, Theodor 103 air-conditioning 38, 38 Alexandria Hotel Beau Rivage 32 Algonquin Hotel (New York) 204 Alloway, Lawrence 57 Alps 39 Ambassador Hotel (Los Angeles) 54–5 Ambasz, Emilio 210 American Elevation Company 11 Americana Hotel (Miami) 78, 81 Amsterdam Hilton Hotel 151–7, 151–4 Ancell, William J. 127 Antoine Graves Homes 173 Architects Design Partnership (ADP) 91, 92 Architectural Review 50 architectural styles 36 Arrowhead Springs Hotel (San Bernardino, California) 50–1 art deco style 76, 129 art hotels 201 Arts and Crafts 209 Asi, Vello 180 Asian investors and Paris grand hotels 40 Astor Hotel (New York) 7 Astor House (New York) 74 Astor, John Jacob 74 Atlanta Marriot 100 Atlanta Regency Hyatt Hotel 70 Augé, Marc 114 Badischer Hof hotel (Baden-Baden) 5–7, 6, 8 Badrutt, Johannes Caspar 35 Baedeker, Carl 30 Banham, Reyner 56, 59, 61, 63–4 bathroom-room ratio, in early hotels 11 Baumschlager & Eberle 230 Beau-Rivage et d’Angleterre Hotel (Geneva) 8 Beauty of Labour 166 Bech, Inge 156 Bellboy (film) 52 Bellevue Hotel (Kleine Scheidegg) 26 Benjamin, Walter 40, 163–4, 165 Bennett, Arnold Imperial Palace 68–9 Bentham, Jeremy 90 Berens, Carol 113

237 Index

Bergère Hotel (Paris) 105–7, 106, 109–10, 109 Berlage, H.P. 155 Bernard, Oliver P. 127–8, 129 Bernhardt, Sarah 24 Bernina Hotel (Samedan) 14 Bigness, notion of 217, 220, 221 Bijvoet, Bernard 136, 139 Blanca, Oscar Tusquets 210 Bogardus, James 74 Bonaventure Hotel (Los Angeles) 84–6, 85 boulevards 28 boutique hotels 86–7, 200–1 Breitling, Stefan 89, 101 Bristol Hotel (Paris) 32 Camino Real Hotel (Mexico City) 216 car culture influence of on hotel design 78–84 caravanserai 4, 7, 9 Carlton Hotel (London) 123 Cathay Hotel (Shanghai) 41 Cattani, Emmanuel 186 cheap chic 87, 205 Chelsea Hotel (London) 24 Ciga hotel chain (Venice) 17 Claridge Hotel (Paris) 18 Claridge’s Hotel (London) 76–7, 77, 127 Clonmore, Lord 122–3 consumer society 28 Cotta, Johann Friedrich 6 countryside, urbanisation of 25–38 Coxe, William Travels in Switzerland 29 Cramer, Johannes 89 Crow, Trammel 173 Crowley, David 184 crusades 4 CUBE concept 227–8 CUBE Hotel (Bieberwier-Lermoss, Austria) 230 CUBE Hotel (Savognin, Switzerland) 230 CUBE Hotel (Tröpolach) 227–31, 227, 229–31 cultural tourism 201 Curtis, W.J.R. Le Corbusier: Ideals and Forms 144 Danieli Hotel (Venice) 32 Daudet, Alphonse 31–2 Davis, Arthur Joseph 75, 120, 122, 123 Dax 186–7 see also Hôtel des Thermes

department stores 32 Derrida, Jacques 106 Diana, Princess 123 Dickens, Charles 6, 74 Disney 50 Doric columns 111, 112 D’Oyly Carte, Richard 9, 11 Draper, Dorothy 50–1, 57 Dreiser, Theodore Sister Carrie 40 Duiker, Johannes 136 Durand, Jean Nicolas Louis 7 Ebel, Johann Gottfried 29–30 Eden Roc Hotel (Miami) 52, 78, 80, 82 educational journeys 29 Edward VII, King 10 Eisen, Percy Augustus 55 elevators see lifts Elling, P. 136 Ellis, Peter 156 Elysée Palace Hotel (Paris) 20, 39 employees, hotel see hotel personnel Engadiner Kulm Hotel (St Moritz) 11, 12, 35, 35, 36 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 29 Erasmus of Rotterdam Colloquia 4 Escoffier, Auguste 9, 9, 121 Estonia 178, 184–5 see also Viru Hotel (Tallinn) Eugénie, Impératrice 38 Fabulous Baker Boys (film) 55 Fahrenkamp, Emil 166 Al-Fayed, Dodi 123 Finland 180 Finnish Communist Party 180 Fischer von Erlach, Johan Bernhard 7 Flückiger-Seiler, Roland Hotel Palaces 34 Fontainebleau Hotel (Miami) 52, 52, 78, 79, 80, 82, 216 Foucault, Michel 103 Four Seasons Hotel (New York) 216 Fourier, Charles 12, 140 Fox Hotel (Copenhagen) 201 Frankfurter Hotel (Frankfurt) 16 French Riviera 26–8, 27 Friedman, Alice 52 Friis, Knud 193 Fukuoka (Japan) 210, 212 Fussell, Paul 107 Galeries Lafeyette department store (Paris) 25 Gans, Taevo 181

238 Index

Gehry, Frank 50 gender and hotels 108–9 Geneva Hotel des Bergues 11 Gibbons, Cedric 53, 66, 77 Giedion, Sigfried 68 Giesler, Hermann 166 Gilded Age 112 Globe Tower (Coney Island) 222 Goebbels 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 5 Goldfinger (film) 52 Göring 166 Gorsuch, Anne 184–5 Graduate, The (film) 54, 55 Gramercy Park Hotel (New York) 198–202, 198–200 Gran, Emmanuel 156 Grand Hotel Dolder (Zurich) 14 Grand Hotel (film) 53–4, 66, 77–8, 86, 104 Grand Hotel Gooiland (Hilversum, Netherlands) 136–9, 136–8 Grand Hotel (Paris) 14, 17 Grand Hotel (Scarborough) 14 Grand Tour 29 Graves, Michael 50, 100, 210 Great Kanto earthquake (1923) 133 Great St Bernard hospice 33–4 Great Western Hotel (London) 75 Greece, ancient 3 Gregersen, Emil 197 Greywalls Hotel (Scotland) 216 Griffin, Marion Mahony 131 Grossform 222 Großstadhotel 103 guest houses 3, 49 Guyer, Eduard 8 Haller, Albrecht ‘The Alps’ 29 Hamlin, Talbot 73 Hardwick, Philip 75 Hartmann, Nicolaus (junior) 36 Hartmann, Nicolaus (senior) 36 Hayner, Norman S. 21, 24, 41 Helmsley Palace (New York) 32 Hemingway, Ernest 10 Hempel, Anouska 96 Hempel Hotel (London) 94–8, 95–6 Hermitage Hotel (Monte Carlo) 25 Hill, Oliver 78 Hilton, Conrad 8, 151 Hilton Corporation 156 Hilton Hotel (Amsterdam) 151–7, 151–4 Hilton Hotel (Heathrow) 100 Hilton Hotel (Rotterdam) 152, 155 Hilton Hotels International 152

historic buildings transforming of into hotels 32–3 Hitler, Adolf 166 Holl, Steven 210 Holland-Amerika Lijn (HAL) 155 Hollywood film and American hotel lobby 49–57 Hoover, J. Edgar 52 Hopper, Edward 115 Hotel Lobby 115, 115 hospitality 3 Hotel Adlon (film) 20 Hotel des Arts (San Francisco) 201 Hotel des Bains (Venice) 10 Hôtel des Thermes (Dax) 186–92, 186–91 hotel guests 123 contribution of to fame of hotel 40 hotel lobbies announcing of hotel’s ‘personality’ in 110 anonymity of 49 architectonics of 58–70 construction of inside the shell of extant buildings 89–102 emotional significance of 86 exclusion of women 108–9 focus for sustainability issues 86 Hollywood film and American 49–58 as a hub for transport and tourism 108–9 illusion and reality at work in 103–18 and local/global journeys 72–87 in motion 84–6 opposing of to traditional church 103–4 as part of the public sphere 113–15 relation to automotive travel 193 as response to forces of modernity 49 hotel names 28 hotel personnel 18, 19–24 hotel porter 18 Hotel Splendid (Dax) 187 Hotellerie et Poste 7 hotels bathroom-room ratio 11 building boom 161 categories of 7–8 construction of social and cultural values of through imagery 114–15

239 Index

displaying art in 201 and gender 108–9 ground-plan designs 12, 13–15, 15 history of 6–18 marketing of 39–40 as a modern play 103 restoration of after dilapidation 111–12 rooms 15–18 transformation of historic buildings into 32–3 Hude, Hermann von der 12, 15, 17, 18 Hunt, Myron 54–5 Hyatt Hotels 228 Hyatt Regency (Atlanta) 7, 100, 171–7, 171–5 Hyatt Regency (San Francisco) 7 Il Palazzo Hotel (Fukuoka) 209–16, 209–11, 213–15 imagery 114–15 Imperial Hotel (Karlsbad) 14 Imperial Hotel (Tokyo) 33, 130–5, 130–4, 209 inns, early 3–5, 5 Intourist 178, 180, 184 Ionides, Basil 76 Ismail Palace hotel (Cairo) 32–3 Italian fascism 168 Jacobsen, Arne 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 164 Jameson, Frederic 84, 86, 228 Japan 209–10 see also Il Palazzo Hotel (Fukuoka) Jerde, Jon 210 Just, Wilhelm 15 Kaiserhof Hotel (Berlin) 16 katagogias 3 Kaufmann, Gordon B. 50 KdF 168–9 KdF Prora Hotel (Rügen) 165–70, 165–9 KdF-Wagen 168, 168 Kempinksi hotels 40 KGB 184 kitchens, hotel 16, 16, 17 Klotz, Clemens 166, 168 Klüber, Johann Ludwig 6 Koolhaas, Rem 210–12, 217, 220, 222, 224 Delirious New York 219, 222, 224 Kracauer, Siegfried 22, 59, 62, 70, 103–4, 109 ‘The hotel lobby’ 95 Krohn, Carsten 142

Kulm Hotel (St Moritz) 35–6, 35 Kursaal de la Maloja Hotel (Switzerland) 36–8, 37, 38, 39 Lakolk Hotel (Rømo, Denmark) 193–7, 193–6 Lapidus hotels (Miami) 78–82, 84 Lapidus, Morris 51–2, 57, 78, 81, 82, 84 Las Vegas 39 Last Laugh, The (film) 19, 19 Last Man, The (film) 18 Lauritzen, Vilhelm 160 Le Corbusier 228 immeuble-villas concept 141 Unité d’Habitation 140–4, 140–3 Y-type office tower 155 Leitner, Maria Hotel Amerika 22–4 leschen 3 Lever House (New York) 161, 179 Ley, Dr Robert 165, 166, 168, 169 lifts 11, 12, 68–70, 69, 84, 86, 174 lighting, hotel 11 lobbies see hotel lobbies lobby halls 15, 62–4, 63, 67 London Ritz see Ritz Hotel (London) London Savoy see Savoy Hotel (London) Loos, Adolf 113 Los Angeles hotel lobbies 49–58 Love in the Afternoon (film) 25 Love in an Apartment Hotel (film) 53 Lux, Joseph 112 Lynes, Russell 72, 74 Lyons and Co, J. 126–7 Lyons, Robert T. 201 Maaskant, Hugh A. 151, 152, 155, 156 Macfarland, James Hood 52 Machado, Rodolfo 89 Mack, Mark 210 Malmaison Hotel (Oxford) 90–4, 90, 91, 93 Maloja 38, 39 Mandarin Oriental Hotel (Paris) 40 Mann, Thomas Death in Venice 21–2 Felix Krull 19–21, 22 Mansart, Jules Hardouin 120 Manser, Michael 100 Mask, The (film) 55 Mathias, Bettina 67 Mayflower Hotel (Washington, DC) 50 Meades, Jonathan 166, 167–8

240 Index

Mérimée, Prosper 5, 28 Métropole Hotel (Vienna) 14 Meurice Hotel (Paris) 18 Mewès, Charles 75, 120, 122, 123 Miami Lapidus hotels 78–82, 84 Midland Grand Hotel (London) 75 Midland Hotel (Morecombe) 78 Milne, Oswald 76, 77 mise en abyme 105–6 modernism 76–8 Moltke, Elmar 193 Montaigne, Michel de 4–5 Montclair Hotel (New York) 23 Montreaux 34, 34 Montreaux Palace 34–5, 34 Moreau, Jeanne 18 Moretti, Luigi 145, 146–7, 149 Morgans Hotel (New York) 203–4 Mount Lavinia Hotel (Kandy, Sri Lanka) 33 Mueller, Paul 132 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 19 Murray, John Handbook for travellers on the Continent 30 Mussolini, Benito 168 Nabokov, Vladimir 35 National Register of Historic Places (US) 52, 55 Nazi Germany 165–9 Niemeyer, Oscar 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich 38 Nixon, Richard M. 145 non-places 114 Noteboom, Cees 105 Nouvel, Jean 186, 187–9 ocean liners 50, 51, 122–3, 140 Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) 217, 224 Okura, Baron 133 operational rooms, hotel 16–17 Oriental hotels 33 Orwell, George 22 Oxford Castle 90 Oxford prison 90–1 Palace Hotel (Caux) 28, 29 Palace Hotel (Chicago) 63 Palacio Quitandinha (Petropolis, Brazil) 50 Palais Royal 25 palm courts 74, 75 Pan Am 107 pandokeen 3 Panopticon 90

Paramount Hotel (New York) 203–8, 203–5, 207 Paris Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts (1925) 76 Paris grand hotels and Asian investors 40 Paris Ritz see Ritz Hotel (Paris) Park, Robert E. 22 Peachtree Centre (Atlanta) 176–7 Pelli, Cesar 210 Pevsner, Nikolaus 122 Phalanstère 12, 140 pilgrimages 4 Pimlott, Mark Without and Within 100–1 Playtime (film) 164 Port, Mart 178–9 Portman, John 7, 63–4, 69–70, 84, 85, 100, 171–2, 173, 176, 228 Portzamparc, Christian de 210 postcards 105–7, 106, 107 Presley, Elvis 52 Pretty Woman (film) 55–7, 56 Promenade des Anglais (Nice) 27, 28 promenades 28 Prora KdF Seebad (Rügen) 165–70, 165–9 Proust, Marcel 10 public rooms, hotel 16 public sphere 113–15 Putlitz, Erich zu 166 Puttman, Andrèe 203 Raffles Hotel (Singapore) 33 railway 26, 32, 32, 39, 107 railway stations 32 merging of with hotel 74–5 Raudsepp, Loomet 181 reception desk 64–6, 65, 73, 77–8 Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel (Los Angeles) 55 Renesse, Count Camille de 36 revolving doors 53, 59–62, 59, 60, 77 Rey Juan Carlos hotel (Barcelona) 7, 8 Rice Hotel (Huston) 109 Rigi-Kulm Grand Hotel 14, 33, 39 Ritz, César 8–11, 9, 32, 76, 120, 123 Ritz Hotel (London) 75–6, 75, 123, 127 Ritz Hotel (Paris) 10, 24–5, 76, 120–4, 120–4 roadside lodgings 82–4, 83 Rogers, Isaiah 72, 73, 74 Romans 3 Rømo 193–4 see also Lakolk Hotel rooms, hotel 15–18 Rossi, Aldo 210, 211, 212, 214, 215

241 Index

Roth, Joseph 68 Hotel Savoy 68, 69 Panoptokum 62 Rotterdam Hilton 152, 155 Rotterdam, SS 155 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 29 Royal Monceau Hotel, Le (Paris) 40 Royalton Hotel (New York) 87, 110, 204 Rubell, Steve 203–4, 205, 208 Saarinen, Eliel 179–80 St Martins Lane Hotel (London) 98–100, 99, 100 St Moritz 35–6, 35 Samedan Hotel Bernina 11 Sandoval-Strausz, A.K. 49 SAS Hotel (Copenhagen) 158–64, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 179 Savoy Hotel (London) 9, 10, 11, 11, 20, 32, 33, 127 Scandinavian approach 197 scenery, marketing potential of 39 Schnabel, Julian 199, 201, 202 Schneck, Stephen The Nightclerk 66 Schrager, Ian 87, 100, 199, 200, 201, 203–4, 205, 208 Scott, Fred 90 Scott, George Gilbert 75 Scott-Brown, Denise 83 Seaterminal Hotel (Zeebrugge) 217–26, 219–21, 223 ‘see and be seen’ 28 Sennett, Richard 113–14, 115 The Fall of Public Man 114 Sepmann, Henno 178–9 Serenyi, Peter 142 servants, hotel 18 Service, Alastair 122 Shangri-La 40 Sheppard, Adrian 146 shifting spaces 89–102 Simmel, Georg 21, 22, 29, 61 ‘Bridge and Door’ 61–2 Sinatra, Frank 52 Singapore Raffles Group 40 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 156 slum sightseeing 39 Smollet, Tobias 26 Sølvsten, Harbo 197 Some Like It Hot (film) 54 Somol, Robert 222 Soviet Council of Ministers 178 Soviet Union 179, 180 spa tourism 29, 30 Spain 36 Spalding Hotel (Duluth) 67, 69

Speer, Albert 166 stairs/staircases 67–8, 81 Starck, Philippe 40, 87, 98, 100, 110, 200, 203, 206 steamship era 72–5 Stern, Robert A.M. 50 Stevens Hotel (Chicago) 16 Strand Hotel Company 126–7 Strand Palace Hotel (London) 126–9, 126, 127, 128 Strauss, Johann 10 Strength through Joy 165 Summatavet, Mait 181 surface culture 39–41 sustainability 86 Suvretta House Hotel (St Moritz) 17 Switzerland 11, 18, 29, 31–2, 33–6 Taj Mahal Hotel (Bombay) 10 Tamm, Väino 180 Tati, Jacques 164 Taylor, Elizabeth 51 Terminus Hotel (Paris) 75 Tessenow, Heinrich 166 Thackeray, William Makepeace Vanity Fair 5 Thai Crown Property Bureau 40 thermal tourism 186–7 Things to Come (film) 63–4 Tigerman, Stanley 50 Tolstoy, Leo Lucerne 28 tourism 107 cultural 201 development from purposeoriented journeys to 25–38 mass 1, 63, 112, 165, 168 and railway 39 spa 29, 30 thermal 186–7 travelling reporting of 28 as a status symbol 28 Tremont House (Boston) 6, 7, 72–4, 73 Trippe, Juan 155 Trump, Donald 55 Tucek, Rudolf 230 Tufts, Otis 68 Tuynman, G.W. 136 Twain, Mark 30–1, 72 2001: Space Odyssey (film) 155

242 Index

Ungers, O.M. 220, 222 Unité d’Habitation (Marseille) 140–4, 140–3 urbanisation of the countryside 25–38 Urchida, Shigeru 215 Van Kannel, Theophilus 59, 61 Venturi, Robert 50, 83 Verenhof Hotel (Baden-Baden) 8 Vermeer, Johannes The Art of Painting 202 Victoria Hotel (London) 11 Vienna Airport 231 Viru Hotel (Tallinn) 178–85, 178–83 Votolato, Greg 49 Waldhaus Hotel (Vulpera) 14, 26 Waldorf Astoria (New York) 54 Walker, Albert Raymond 55 Wasmuth, Ernst 130–1 ‘Watergate’ 145 Watergate Hotel (Washington) 145–50, 145–8 Watergate Steps 145 Weekend at the Waldorf (film) 54 Weinbrenner, Friedrich 7 Weisskamp, Herbert 156, 161 Werfel, Franz ‘Die Hoteltreppe’ 67–8 Wharton, Annabel Jane Building the Cold War 157 Wigwam Village (Kentucky) 83 Willard, Henry 32 Willard Hotel (Washington) 110, 111–13, 111, 114 Williams, Jefferson The American Hotel 11 Williams, Paul R. 50, 55 Willis, Edwin B. 53 Wills, Frederick J. 127 women exclusion of from hotel lobbies 108 Wood the Younger, John 146 Wright, Frank Lloyd 15, 33, 130–2, 133, 209 Yateman, Catherine 91–2 Zeebrugge Ferry Terminal 217–26