Leonhard Clemens, Exit Parliament: The Hotel as a Political Institution by AA Projective Cities

EXIT PARLIAMENT The hotel as a political institution

Exit Parliament â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The hotel as a political institution

Leonhard Alexander Clemens Dissertation June 2016 MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design Architectural Association School of Architecture London Projective Cities 2014 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2016 As any work is always the product of concerted efforts I would like to express my gratitude to those who supported me during my studies and in particular my parents for their unconditional and endless support. Furthermore I would like to thank the DAAD for supporting me during my studies and the AA for supporting me with a Bursary.

11 18 34

Introduction From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics The Modern Hotel Genre and Type Design Project: Ante-Room

51 65 79

Design Projects Hotel Berlin Hotel Paris Hotel Brussels

94 102 110

Public Homes Domestic Politics The Hotel as a Political Institution

116

Bibliography

121

Appendix Room Manual

11 18 34

Introduction From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics The Modern Hotel Genre and Type Design Project: Ante-Room

51 65 79

Design Projects Hotel Berlin Hotel Paris Hotel Brussels

94 102 110

Public Homes Domestic Politics The Hotel as a Political Institution

116

Bibliography

121

Appendix Room Manual

INTRODUCTION

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

“Each of our hotels”, I said, “is a little America” Conrad Hilton1

Innkeeper on a political mission: Conrad Hilton and a model of the Hilton Istanbul.

In 1957, in the midst of the Cold War, not a politician but an innkeeper and devoted businessman entered the political stage to take sides. Conrad N. Hilton, the founder of the famous Hilton Hotel chain, declared his hotels ‘little America’ and made his political ambitions explicit when he stated: “An integral part of my dream was to show the countries most exposed to Communism the other side of the coin – the fruits of the free world”.2 Hilton had not become delusional but had viable grounds for linking his hotel business with political ambitions. In fact, Hilton Hotels abroad were largely financed by the American Government through the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and funds from the Marshall Plan (US$ 50 million) with the aim to restructure the economic and civic order in the host countries. 3 The interest of the American government in the hotel as a form of political embassy testifies to its relevance as a political instrument of soft power and status. Drawing on Sara Fregonese’s and Adam Ramadan’s notion of hotel geopolitics – “More than neutral sites of corporate hospitality where visitors reside, relax and consume”4 – , hotels have replaced the void, left by the incapacity of modern democratic states to effectively communicate a political vision through its official channels (traditional planning strategies, i.e. representative buildings), with the subtle mechanisms and seductive power of commercial architecture, materiality and technology. Accordingly Hilton hotels became the projection surface of modern American culture imagination – its ultimate aspiration or as Siegfried Kracauer once described it in his seminal text The Hotel Lobby, the surface expression of modern life.5 Respectively, Hilton understood his hotels as spaces of cultural

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

“Each of our hotels”, I said, “is a little America” Conrad Hilton1

Innkeeper on a political mission: Conrad Hilton and a model of the Hilton Istanbul.

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

rapprochement and likewise as effective spaces of political negotiation – as embassies for spreading world peace. While Hilton’s interest in the hotel as a political project was concluded with the end of the Cold War and his vision fulfilled with the subsequent aggressive spreading of capitalism around the world, hotels remained places of cultural imagination and until today function as key sites to our political life. Hotels effectively have become supplements to our official institutions. This condition is evident in the reliance of governments, NGOs and industries as well as private people on the hotel as a neutral space that caters for their need of meetings, negotiations and even representational forms of gatherings outside the official channels. Recent practices and routines such as the G7 summit or the Bilderberg group meetings provide evidence of this condition. However, understanding the hotel as a cultural project of major importance to the representational and functional complex of politics, leads us to question its current status and condition. While Hilton’s political vision of shaping particular subjectivities through the use of modern architecture and modern domestic settings has become largely normalised and today is associated with the tropes of commercial architecture par excellence, the potential of the hotel as a project of

Hilton advertisment promoting the idea of international hopitality and the chain‘s hotels as embassies of peace.

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

The hotel as a substitute to official political institutions.

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

Hilton advertisment promoting the idea of international hopitality and the chain‘s hotels as embassies of peace.

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

The hotel as a substitute to official political institutions.

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

domestic ideals of the time. The Kanzler Bungalow in Bonn – the former German Presidential Residence (1964-1999) - serves as an insightful example of how modern domestic styles and settings were used to identify with the new democratic society of post war Germany: The dining room served for conferences, the living room as reception for events and for briefings or casual meetings.

Lobby in the Palace of Westminster and generic hotel lobby.

political importance and civic ambition has not been re-addressed. Instead the vision of the early Hilton hotels has been diluted into a form of pragmatism that lacks any ambition for shaping a political subjectivity6 other than perpetuating a constant refinement of consumer culture through relentless market specification and programmatic updates.

While politics increasingly use domestic settings for their daily routines, the hotels response to these changes is only limited. The modern hotel, a typology characterised by its functional zoning and respective separation of public services such as conference rooms from its private guest-rooms, has been hindered from catering to a more cohesive relation between domestic settings and political protocols. Instead the demands were addressed within the given boundaries of the architectural diagram. This has produced a twofold situation: First, the ever increasing specialisation of hotels in subgenres like spa-hotels, boutique hotels or conference hotels. And second, the almost unlimited growth (mutation) of the base of the hotel containing its services, responding to the market demands by purely adding program to it. While the former comes at the cost of disregarding an holistic and civic approach to the hotel, by isolating it from its urban context into specialised zones that only supply the hotel with the necessary minimal infrastructure, the latter prevents the hotel from actually producing a more meaningful relation between its spaces and forms of usage (protocols). Instead larger conferences are met by moving out of the city (Schloss Elmenau) or by temporarily transforming the hotel space before going back to business as usual.

Yet politics always have and still do rely on the vision produced in the hotel as a form of representative platform. The shift of political organisation from what Jürgen Habermas called the ‘representative publicness’ to a ‘bourgeois public sphere’7 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has entailed practices and routines of government authorities and private people to meet outside the official institutions. This shift is evident in the redundancy of the lobby in Palace of Westminster, originally conceived of as a place for meeting with non-members of Parliament, and its subsequent transgression into hotel lobbies. Thus hotels as sites of politics are the symptom of a political power condition in which governments administrations are increasingly reliant on working outside the official channels.8 The hotel as a favoured place for this has several reasons. One is the convergence of political administrative work and routines of business administration, another can be linked to the hotel’s representative qualities. Often mistaken for a neutral space, the hotel, an elitist project, represents the qualities of the non-official. This representative quality is called for in particular situations of political negotiations or presentation of decisions, that are not yet to be made in the framework of proper political institutions such as the parliament. According to the above mentioned shift of political organisation, politics have started to identify with the imagery of the bourgeois sphere, namely the domestic. In turn, governments started to treat their representational premises following

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

Typological problem of separation: While the flexible base of the hotel consumes all program, the top remains static. 15

Lobby in the Palace of Westminster and generic hotel lobby.

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

Typological problem of separation: While the flexible base of the hotel consumes all program, the top remains static. 15

In the context of the above the dissertation enters the convergence between politics and the civil sphere, in order to reclaim the potential of the hotel as a project with a clear political and cultural agency. In so doing the dissertation proposes three hotel projects in Berlin, Paris and Brussels that cater more specifically for the routines of daily political practice, exercised by personnel associated with and employed by the administrative complex of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s governmental related institutions, i.e. advisors, board members, secretaries and politicians but also the wider related spectrum of activists, lobbyists and managers. In short, the project intends to provide a platform for a body of post-political9 or post-democratic work that is currently not addressed by any architectural project. This poses two fundamental questions: How can the hotel as a private commercial project cater more specifically for the routines of this daily political practice? And second, how can the hotel reclaim its status as an ambitious civic project in the context of official political institutions, and become a political institution in its own right? The consideration of the Hilton case offers a relevant entry to the problem as it raises a number of questions. These questions are related to the role of domesticity as an agent for shaping particular subjectivities and catering for particular forms of hospitality. Furthermore the Hilton case provides a starting point for discussing the ability of the private sector to cater for public ends as a political project. Following these more general considerations, the dissertation therefore proposes domesticity as a key strategy to revise and rethink the hotel in its architectural and urban form. Intrinsically linked to and apparent in the hotel design, domesticity provides an opportunity and potential, to reformulate the typical diagram of the hotel. This approach requires to go beyond the idiosyncratic character of domestic styles and poses more fundamental questions directed towards the relation of spatial domestic layouts and particular protocols of use and hospitality. In doing so, each of the three design projects, conceived as part of a hotel chain, explores a potential strategy (corridor, atrium, arcade) for each site. After all, each project renegotiates the role of the hotel as a civic institution, as a distinct type of public building in the city and domesticity as its underlying subversive strategy for the discipline of urban design.

Briefing and conference in the living room of the Kanzler Bungalow.

Chancelor Helmut Kohl (r.) with Queen Elizabeth II. and prince Philip in front of the Kanzler Bungalow, 1992

German chancelor Ludwig Erhard (1963-1966) testing the domestic environment for media representation..

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

Briefing and conference in the living room of the Kanzler Bungalow.

Chancelor Helmut Kohl (r.) with Queen Elizabeth II. and prince Philip in front of the Kanzler Bungalow, 1992

German chancelor Ludwig Erhard (1963-1966) testing the domestic environment for media representation..

From Hotel Politics to Hosting Politics

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

The Hilton Istanbul (1955) as an example of the hotel as an geopolitical instrument.

The first American hotel, the Union Public Hotel in Washington D.C., built in 1793 by Samuel Blodget Jr.,

Housing a New Society The modern commercial hotel is a truly American invention. It was born in the early period of a young nation that saw itself confronted with an unprecedented population growth and mobility that was the combined effect of rising capitalism and new personal liberty at the beginning of the 19th century. The new democratic society arising from this epochal shift created a continued tension in the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s institutions which required/entailed new models of socialisation and negotiation outside the traditional domains of home or official state channels.10 In response to this need and the consequent search for a public life and a civil society, the hotel emerged to fill the void existent in a young nation with no significant architectural history and only familiar with one typology even for its representative buildings: the American home. As a testing ground for a new typology that combined familiar domestic settings with elements of untested public social life, the American hotel differs from the definition of the European hotel provided by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner: Preoccupied with the historical development and transformation of the European palais into first hotels, Pevsner disregarded a definition of the hotel as an original diagram that combined particular forms of domestic ideals with a new service structure and organisation oriented towards efficiency and standardisation. Instead, Pevsner read the hotel as a project that differed in scale from taverns and inns.11 However the differentiation in mere size does not account for the complete new standard of hospitality, programme and technological infrastructure provided by the American hotel project, anticipating the desire for a more urban and commercial nation. Consequently the American hotel marks and reflects a breaking point in the development of the hotel as it established the basis for progressive standardization,

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Little America: shaping subjectivities through modern interior design and technology.

The lobby as a space for social encounter and hospitality.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

The Hilton Istanbul (1955) as an example of the hotel as an geopolitical instrument.

The first American hotel, the Union Public Hotel in Washington D.C., built in 1793 by Samuel Blodget Jr.,

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Little America: shaping subjectivities through modern interior design and technology.

The lobby as a space for social encounter and hospitality.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

The emergence of the American hotel: Early standardisation and domestic origin.

1700 - Colonial Period

1722 - Delware House

1783 - Tavern Inn

1809 - Boston Exchange Coffee House and Hotel

1825/1832 - Philadelphia Arcade and Office Building

1901 - Statler Hotel

Standard American house: The home is devided into two separate parts, each of which served multi purpose.

The devision of the domestic space into more specific spaces on multiple levels started to change the domestic roles within a single family.

The first inns and taverns were mostly transformed standard houses of the time.

The Exchange Coffe House and Hotel shows the basic spatial origin of the early American hotel: the dissagregation of the private household. Individual bedchambers were placed on the upper floors, shared public spaces on the first and second floor.

Gridlike arrangement of rooms and cellularity emerge in office architecture in the early nineteenth century.

The Statler Hotel shows long double loaded corridors, a room layout that had become standard in large hotels by the early twentieth century.

The emergence of the American hotel: Early standardisation and domestic origin.

1700 - Colonial Period

1722 - Delware House

1783 - Tavern Inn

1809 - Boston Exchange Coffee House and Hotel

1825/1832 - Philadelphia Arcade and Office Building

1901 - Statler Hotel

Standard American house: The home is devided into two separate parts, each of which served multi purpose.

The devision of the domestic space into more specific spaces on multiple levels started to change the domestic roles within a single family.

The first inns and taverns were mostly transformed standard houses of the time.

Gridlike arrangement of rooms and cellularity emerge in office architecture in the early nineteenth century.

The Statler Hotel shows long double loaded corridors, a room layout that had become standard in large hotels by the early twentieth century.

commercialisation and a civil life that became the corner stone of the American dream and a nation that would later even influence Immanuel Kant’s concept of universal hospitality. As such the commercial hotel in particular provided an important function to the metropolitan civilisation sharing its status with the concurrent development of the structural type of the skyscraper office building. The following outline focuses on the development of the American commercial hotel (in particular the luxury hotel), its typological characteristics and successive forms of standardisation. Concurrently the assimilation of domesticity in the design of hotels is highlighted as an indicator and instrument for changing sociopolitical norms, ideals, subjectivities, hospitality and economic standards, offering an entry point to discuss the current condition of the hotel typology today. For this purpose the history of the American hotel will be discussed in two parts: First, its emergence as a new building genre and second, its subsequent development as a recognisable typology in the context of an emerging culture of efficiency and consumer culture. This will also reveal the development and shift of the hotel from a project of political intention to social intention and finally to a project of business and commercial interests. The need for a new type of building that would meet the socio-political demands of the young American nation was first noticed by George Washington, the first American President, on his famous presidential tour across the nation in 1789. On his mission to foster trust throughout all the federal states and to inform himself of the current condition of the nation, Washington was reliant on independent accommodation that would not be read as favourism while staying at local familie’s homes. In so doing, he was reliant on taverns and inns - larger family houses - of often doubtful standard and unsuitable for Washington’s delegation and the rising national looking for public spaces of socialisation. His comments on the bad condition of the existing taverns and inns were registered by friends of Washington – young entrepreneurs - on his return to Philadelphia, the then capital of the USA. The first American hotel, the Union Public Hotel in Washington D.C., was built in 1793 by Samuel Blodget Jr., a financier, merchant, and founding father of the Insurance Company of North America. As a deliberate effort to provide a new form of public house for the improvement of the city and as a pivotal political site while following profitable interest, the hotel not only was the biggest privately owned building in the city but also surpassed the common standards of internal arrangement of any public house in the nation up to that point. Designed by James Hoban, the Irish architect also responsible for the design of the White House, the Union Public Hotel was constructed out of brick and stone in Georgian style ornamented with classical columns. Its main floor offered several public meeting spaces and an unprecedented amount of bedchambers on the upper floors and the basement. While the hotel turned out to be a financial failure for Blodget, the building itself gained importance for the operation of the government. It so happened, that the building first served as the headquarter of the Postal and Patent Office and after the war of 1812 between Britain and the United States of America the hotel’s public rooms became the temporary seat of Congress for over 14 month as the Capitol was partly destroyed.

Waldorf Astoria in New York: The hotel as palace for the Amercian people.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Waldorf Astoria in New York: The hotel as palace for the Amercian people.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

The Union Public Hotel prompted imitators across the nation taking on the challenge of building a profitable public house. The City Hotel in Manhatten was the first succesfull project of this kind; a brick structure in Federal building style that combined on the first and second floor a ballroom, public parlors, bar, stores, offices and a library. Its size exceeded all other buildings in New york at the time, providing it landmark status. Built on the site of a former well know tavern, its location proved to be key to its success. Its approach to centralise social activities was met by its served clientel â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Gothamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s power elite, who used the hotel for concerts, business meetings and private balls as well as a finishing school. As a result the New York Custom House was relocated into the hotel as it turned into a primary spot for business. This effect was not only limited to the hotel but spurred a general transfomation of the neigbourhood area, attracting smaller shops and businesses. As the most important public space in New York, the hotel became an important political space hosting political rallies and meetings as well as serving as presidential balls. While hotels were conceived of as public houses, in actual fact, they exclusively served the white upper class elite mirroring the prevailing social hierarchy of the time. Hence their design was oriented at familiar patterns of colonial and European styles and material culture, reviving the visual language of a more aristocratic society: ballrooms were designed to recall the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles while the exterior often resembled European Palazzo architecture. The ambition of the hotel project to create a new public and civic space was intrinsically linked to a reassessment of the domestic as the traditional precedent of hospitality. As such the domestic was not only a blueprint for the design of the hotel lobby, room or dining room but also indicated the social status of its clientel through its use of particular styles and by offering particular domestic layouts. In so doing domesticity became the key agent to shape particular subjectivities. The translation of domestic hospitality into a public form entailed its rearrangement to new quantities and different services. However hotels were still untested typologies without a direct design formula to guarantee commercial success, as such their development remained a risky venture, albeit one which was open for testing its limitations. The preliminary climax of this founding phase (development/search) of the first generation of American Hotels was reached with the Exchange Coffee House (1809) in Boston. Impressive in scale, the seven stories high building, was arranged on an irregular plot and around a central atrium that was covered by a dome. While the decorum of the building resembled the familiar tropes of classical architecture, its layout included an early structural shift that indicated the hotelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ongoing emancipation from domestic vernacular forms of hospitality and its slow convergence towards more systematic and structural design principles, such as those which already existed in modern administration and office buildings at the time. This shift was indicated by the arrangement of bedrooms on the upper floor along a double loaded corridor opposed to an irregular arrangement of rooms, which in turn was also different on each floor.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Domestic vernacular forms of hospitality, largely reliant on a host-guest relationship, equally started to be depersonalised with the increasing size of hotels such as the Boston Exchange Coffee house and were replaced by trained service staff. In accordance with this form of specified service structure the architectural layout of the hotel started to cater and reflect this division of labour and functions by further subdividing and grouping its spaces into operable units and specified functions. Its transformation reflected the larger shift towards industrialisation that would largely define the hotels of the 20th century.

Standardised Domestic Dreams As the first generation of hotels represented an aspirational model to construct and test the spatial dimensions of a new public sphere, its forming as a distinct and consistent type emerged with the progressive industrialisation into forms of standardisation and scientific management at the turn of the 20th century. In doing so, its political ambitions complied with the emerging norms of the market economy, mass culture, a rising middle class and the emergence of consumer culture. In consistence with the upcoming mass-tourism, hotels started to become more use oriented and further divided into subgenres such as resort and business hotels fostering models of commercial hospitality. This first of all meant the restructuring of the hotel according to profit oriented models and its most visible component its interior design and with it appropriation of domestic ideals.

Louis XIV styled rooms in the Waldorf Astoria: Imagination of an aristocratic European lifestyle.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Louis XIV styled rooms in the Waldorf Astoria: Imagination of an aristocratic European lifestyle.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

The project of hotel standardisation was carried out by a handful of architects and firms specialised in hotel design and that embodied the “larger struggle between narratives of sentimentality and of efficiency in early twentieth–century culture”.12 Mostly trained in Beaux Arts environment their architectural language was classical while their organisational thinking became largely influenced by upcoming theories of efficiency, above all Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). The first instance towards more efficiently planned hotels and the shift to commercial hotel architecture was taken with the notorious icon of grand urban hotels, the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Designed in two stages by architect Henry J. Hardenbergh during the 1890s, it gained the status of being ‘The mother of the modern hotel’13 for its unprecedented size of one thousand-rooms and its equally efficient accommodation of services and management. Yet the hotel still resembled in its design the excess and luxury of palaces stemming from its status as a culturally elitist project. This ambition was reflected in the lavish use of interior decoration as well as the fact that the rooms were designed and named after Louis XIV’s private chambers in the palace of Versailles. Embracing modern business methods, cost efficient planning started to affect design choices not only on an organisational but also increasingly on an aesthetic and stylistic level. Especially hotel chains, aiming to cater for the uprising mass tourism and larger social groups, started to follow this new paradigm to expand their market share. The Biltmore hotel in New York built in 1913 by Warren and Wetmore exemplifies this ambition by adapting its organisation to the existing composition of commercial architecture; a five-story plinth containing the major public spaces and a U-shaped tower containing the rooms with larger ballrooms on top forming a capital to the structure. More than the exterior facade, the interior layout and organisation indicated the true advent of modern planning and the forming of a consistent typology: the separation of public spaces in the base from the guest-rooms in a tower above and a finishing ball room on top established a common organisation. Moreover, the Biltmore featured a square shaped floor plan that supported a symmetrical and efficient organisation of the rooms and services.

Waldorf Astoria NY - 1890

Biltmore NY - 1913

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Statler NY - 1917

The first noteworthy example of the emerging standardisation and efficient organisation of the hotel came in 1917 with the opening of E.M. Statler’s first hotel in New York: the hotel Pennsylvania. Planned by the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White between 1917-1918, the Pennsylvania represented one out of the chain’s five properties. The hotel was characterised by its minimal approach to interior decoration using cheaper materials such as terra cotta tiles, artificial marble or cast iron while addressing a middle-class clientel. Also the exterior façade of the hotel was designed in a simple fashion which was in turn kept consistent throughout all branches regardless of their changing sites. Statler’s true revolutionary impact on hotel design, however, must be related to his Fordist approach to the organisation of the typical floor plan and the single room unit. Primarily concerned with functional aspects of the hotel design, Statler was the first to structure his plans starting form the single guest room unit and expanding his approach toward the sizing of the steel frame; this was an unusual approach

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Waldorf Astoria NY - 1890

Biltmore NY - 1913

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Statler NY - 1917

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

at the time which usually saw the cost efficient planning of the steel structure dictating the layout of the floor plans. Also unusual for the time and a radical reassessment to domestic living standards was Statlerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s provision of a ensuite bath in every room. The spatial diagram of the Pensylvannia further fostered the trend towards grouping functional zones in the lower floors, the towers and upper floors, allowing for an efficient flow between these zones. This included for the first time separate sample-room floors for salesmen traditionally integrated in the guest room floors and allowing for a more efficient grouping of guest rooms. This exemplified a general tendency to adapt to the new routines of a growing consumption and business culture. New cost calculating methods and publications like the operational manual Hotel Management by Lucius Boomer (1925) led to a further refinement of the hotel diagram to increase revenue and make operation more efficient. The clear spatial typology of the hotel thus resulted in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s common bipartite diagram of public services in the base and rooms on top as can be seen in the example of Holabird and Rocheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Palmer hotel in Chicago. The increasing use of hotels for conventions and conferences made this a necessary transformation for the efficient operation of the hotel business. Following this notion hotels also increasingly integrated commercial zones, like shopping arcades into the ground floor layout: inward oriented public space that allowed the hotel to correspond to the public monumentality of its building scale. The rising importance of the hotel as a super-typology in the city, that bundles its facilities of public socialisation and business together with private forms of accommodation was pointed out by Rem Koolhaas in his effort to unify the city under the paradigm of the generic.

Statler Hotels: Standardisation of hotel design.

Hotels are becoming the generic accommodation of the Generic City, its most common building block. Hotels are now containers that, in the expansion and completeness of their facilities make almost all other buildings redundant. (Rem Koolhaas, 1997)14

While Koolhaas, with his general cynical opportunism towards the current condition of the city, presents the status quo of the hotel as its inevitable and unchangeable future, he disregards the possibility and history of the hotel to constantly challenge the status of living standards and to form a specific project, a particular vision, constantly waiting for its moment of reinvention. For what we might call generic today once used to be a highly specific answer to a changing society and the expression of concerted efforts of private and public interests. This development is most visible with the example of Hilton hotels abroad, such as the Hilton Istanbul (1955) - the first of the hotel franchise imperium in Europe. Continuing the previous project of standardisation and efficiency, Hilton hotels formed the standard of hotel design until today. Planed by SOM, the Hilton Istanbul was unprecedented in its efficient organisation. Accordingly its layout followed in almost Fordist manner the linear processing of guests from their arrival, to the reception, to the elevator and finally to the room. This process was embedded

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Statler Hotels: Standardisation of hotel design.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

transform the home into functionally planned, minimal machines for living, hotels further responded to this development by adapting to modern domestic standards for their interior designs. At the same time hotels promoted an idealised imagery of these living standards by offering state of the art technology and domestic amenities such as pools or mini bars. With the development of the Hilton as the standard of hospitality world wide, former concerns of innkeepers to balance their hotel appearance as either homelike or business-like became obsolete. Domestic settings started to become widely accepted and preferred environments for business practices and politics alike. Such routines include conferences, interviews, political dinners, negotiations, briefings, sales deals and so on.

Adaption of domestic styles: Furniture layout in American home (1950) and Hilton Istanbul (1955)- new protocols of socialisation.

in the typical spatial diagram of the modern hotel in separating the base with the lobby, public services, conference rooms from the rooms on top. In so doing, Hilton hotels offered a specific answer to changing mass tourism and mirrored the political intention of its founder Conrad Hilton. The modern interior design of the Hilton and its particular take on domestic settings and styles mirrored the intention to shape the modern subject: the idealised American consumer. The lavish use of colonial interior designs as found in the Statler or the ostentatious palace aesthetics used in the Waldorf Astoria, were exchanged for furniture layouts and modern decorative styles borrowed from American middle class homes. Such layouts, once transferred form the idealised American home into the lobby of the hotel, were adapted to forms of socialisations that allowed for strangers to meet without the presence of a host. The clear range of pre-scripted protocols of encounter and socialisation met the heroic nonchalance of movies like the 1963 Bond movie From Russia with Love. The latest standardisation of the hotel business, however, was not an idiosyncratic tendency of business alone but intrinsically linked to the social rise of the middle class and related questions of housing and living standards. In this the hotel played a simultaneous double role as pioneer and instigator and response to the changing living standards promoting domestic ideals. With the founding of the CIAM and its second meeting in 1929 on The Minimum Dwelling in Frankfurt, the problem of a prevailing lower and middle class had risen to full awareness. Supported by the larger political agendas such as the New Deal, politicians and architects in concerted effort to resolve the matter, identified the domestic as a means to shape the subjectivity of the working class society. While standardisation and the well known tales of modernity started to invade and

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Understanding the domestic as the hotelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s underlying notion through which it operates and organises its social, political and economic intentions, enables it to be seen as a valid category and perspective through which the current status of the hotel can be reformulated. In other words it denotes the specific or nongeneric part within an otherwise generic diagram of the typology. What this means, by implication is that other then rethinking the scale of furniture layouts or technological applications, this first of requires, a radical reformulation of the basic relationship between domestic spaces in the hotel, which have been separated as a result of the history of standardisation and efficiency. Restrained by the perfected diagram of efficient organisation and in compliance with marketing strategies, domesticity in the hotel has become merely the backdrop for selective tastes rather than a project of fundamental spatial and architectural quality. This problem becomes visible in the current upheaval of the hospitality business as a result of emerging platforms such as Airbnb which are enjoying great popularity for providing full domestic accommodations to guests allowing them to cater for more domestic forms of hospitality.

Idealised Amercian domesticity.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Adaption of domestic styles: Furniture layout in American home (1950) and Hilton Istanbul (1955)- new protocols of socialisation.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Idealised Amercian domesticity.

The Modern Hotel Genre and Type

Chapter

Design Project: Ante-Room

furniture, setting boundaries and limitations: While the private room is reserved for the guest only, the lobby, bar or restaurant are open to the public and can be freely accessed. However, as previously described, the project of functional zoning and efficiency has produced a particular arrangement of domestic spatial settings, which equally foster operative conditions of hospitality. The 2013 negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal in Geneva, as portrayed by Julian Borger in the Guardian, gives a powerful example of this condition but also shows its related problems: While the negotiations were originally scheduled to be held in Geneva’s monumental Palace of Nations, a building exclusively built for the purpose of negotiations, all participants preferred a five-star Intercontinental hotel.18 Here the amenities of its service infrastructure allowed participants to take little naps or have a shower between talks. However, it so happened that the negotiations went on into the weekend when the rest of the hotel was booked out for charity balls and parties, accompanying the negotiations with the tunes of Jonny Cash’s Ring of Fire and Loch Lomond. The inconvenience of this incident was compounded by the problem of catering.

The design proposal for three related hotels aims to cater to a wider constituency of people working in politics, business or cultural institutions, posing two questions at different scales: First, how can the traditional diagram of the hotel typology be transformed in order to cater more specifically for the protocols of this constituency? And second, how does this allow for the hotel as a private commercial project to generate its status as a building of public importance in the urban context? Or in other words, what is the potential gain for the city without following the delirium of Portman’s Marriot Hotels in Atlanta, that Koolhaas described as an ‘ersatz downtown’ promoting the city centre’s degeneration?15 As this dual objective comes into focus, domesticity offers a potential socio-spatial category through which typological and urban concerns can be addressed. This follows the premise that domesticity is a spatial category which is not restricted to the limit of the traditional home but which is actually part of an expansive social policy and logic that reaches beyond the private sphere, allowing a simultaneous restructuring of the public sphere and the urban.16 Thus domesticity as a planning strategy becomes part of what Charles Rice phrased ‘interior urbanism’, an urbanism “suis generis”, that “arise[s] from a constant phasing of interior and exterior sensibilities and experiences within and across projects”.17 In the context of the hotel, this experience is related to the notion of hospitality, as the underlying script of social conventions and protocols of encounter, defining and defined by the domestic layout. In this sense and as Sara Fregonese and Adam Ramadan put it, hospitality establishes different forms of openness and enclosure that negotiate between the private and the public, between the hotel and the city. As a fundamentally political concept of social encounter, hospitality only exists within the boundaries and limits set by the guest –host relationship. In the hotel, this condition, besides a legal contract, is implied in the spatial layout of its plan and

Design Project – Ante-Room

Hospitality in lower and upper class homes: informality vs. formality.

Design Project – Ante-Room

Design Project: Ante-Room

Design Project – Ante-Room

Hospitality in lower and upper class homes: informality vs. formality.

Design Project – Ante-Room

While ordering room service only offered a socially less engaging format, getting dinner often meant the participants had to pass through the lobby which was crowded with journalists hankering for news. Following Borger, the delegations improvised by either ordering their national cuisine form nearby restaurants, heading out for their favourite pizza place or just simply holding out with snacks from the bar.

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Great Hall Salon - Dining room Ante-room Drawing-room Bedroom

As this anecdote illustrates, there is a fervent demand for domestic spaces as a backdrop for political negotiations, which has not yet been fully capitalised on. It is precisely here, that the dissertation aims to propose an alternative domestic model for the hotel. Thereby the notion of being able to be hospitable to someone else rather than relying exclusively on the services of the hotel becomes integral to the design conception. Through the reasoning of a historical domestic model – the ante-room – the intention to implement such protocols is made legible.

Before the invention of the hotel, hospitality was with the exception of taverns and inns mainly a domestic concern. The home therefore not only served the private sphere but simultaneously held the potential of engaging with outsiders. While the history of domesticity can be understood as the progressive separation of the private from the public, forms of hospitality throughout history constantly defined and made visible the shifting paradigm and threshold of these two spheres.19 It can be argued, that with the invention of the modern hotel, the separation of the private from the public sphere was realised, however nowadays these two spheres have once again started to mix in the home. Therefore the hotel’s form of hospitality is challenged. Depending on social class, protocols of hospitality were inscribed in some formal way in the layout of the spatial plan. While in the lower classes with only little means, hospitality was restrained to sharing a room with a stranger, the aristocratic upper classes developed more formal ways of hospitality, reflected in distinct spatial layouts and protocols.

Such highly formalised protocols could even pass through the most private areas of the home, the bed room, turning it into a space of socio-political importance. This point is best exemplified by Louis XIV’s morning ceremonies at the Palace of Versailles, called ‘petit’ and ‘grand levée’.20 The daily routine commenced with the ‘petit levée’, the awakening of the King by the Valet de Chambre in the presence of doctors and familiars, followed by the ‘grand levée’, where the King would get dressed and have breakfast in the presence of his officers and other highly ranked persons. The ceremony proceeded from the bed chamber to the hall of mirrors, passing through the chamber’s ante-rooms, where the royal cortége greeted the King. After the King’s morning service at the Royal Chapel, he would return back to his apartment where he held council in his cabinet. The formalised spatial sequence of ante-room to bedchamber was copied by aristocratic palaces throughout Europe and adapted to the sequence of anteroom, drawing room and bed room. By the mid 18th century, adaptations to the symmetrical Paladian palazzo architecture were made by extending the sequence with a principal dining room or salon.21 Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire is a good example of this. Also referred to as state rooms, indicating its political

Design Project – Ante-Room

Blenheim Palace Oxfordshire, 1715

Blenheim Palace Oxfordshire: Sequence of ante-rooms encapsulating formal domestic protocols of hospitality. 0

Blenheim Palace Oxfordshire, 1715

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Great Hall Salon - Dining room Ante-room Drawing-room Bedroom

Design Project – Ante-Room

Blenheim Palace Oxfordshire, 1715

Blenheim Palace Oxfordshire: Sequence of ante-rooms encapsulating formal domestic protocols of hospitality. 0

Blenheim Palace Oxfordshire, 1715

The loss of formal spatial sequences from the palace to the modern hotel.

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire 1715

Atheaneum Club, London 1824

Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York 1893-97

Hilton Hotel, Istanbul 1955

The loss of formal spatial sequences from the palace to the modern hotel.

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire 1715

Atheaneum Club, London 1824

Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York 1893-97

Hilton Hotel, Istanbul 1955

origin, the progression of rooms followed and hosted the protocols of welcoming guests, dining and after dinner conversation. In other words, the plan catered for the protocols of hospitality, according to a representative common social codex. This, however, was not only achieved by the sequencing of rooms alone, which after all did not feature any particular distinguishable characteristics, but through the interplay with particular furniture layouts and decorum such as paintings or carpets. As upper class town houses in cities like London served aristocratic lifestyles, they also imported their protocols of hospitality. However, due to the relatively small size of urban plots new spatial organisations were required in which this sequence of rooms had to be redistributed over separate floors. This also led to a clearer differentiation of protocols according to room sizes and location in the house and allowed for more privacy in the bedrooms. The breaking up of the enfilade room system was also due to the implementation of the Italian central corridor in England at the turn of 17th century and its wider popularisation in the second half of it.22 Although dating back a long time and not to be read as a linear development, the subsequent enforcement of the corridor as a common architectural element made the later project of hotel standardisation, functional zoning and efficiency possible. Concurrently the upper class homes, in particular in France, became places of important sociable meetings, the so called salons. Named after its meeting place, political salons formed an important nucleus within the Enlightenment, as they offered the chance to discuss politics and literature outside of official institutions.23 The increasing demand for spaces of sociable and political meeting within the upper social strata, but also increasingly in the middle and working class, was met in London by the gentlemen’s clubs in the late nineteenth century. 24 As substitutes to the home, they offered domestic services and amenities such as dining, reading or breakfast rooms. In a way, gentlemen’s clubs led to the separation of the private domestic from the public, anticipating the role of the hotel and, likewise, moving forms of domestic hospitality out of the home into an institutionalised format. Eventually this led in the modern hotel to the aforementioned rejection of more comprehensive domestic settings in favour of an efficient organisation and separation of the private from public areas.

The home as politcal space: Salon de Madame Geoffrin, Paris.

The possibility of the ante-room to function as a domestic space to integrate and implement a gradual sequence of protocols between public and private forms of hospitality, allows a challenge to the typical diagram of the hotel. The ‘ante-room’ hereby denotes a concept that extends the single bedroom through a series of additional rooms, each with their own function, and a linear, gradual opening towards more public areas. As such the notion of the ‘ante-room’ extends beyond the walls of the single apartment and includes the lobby, and even the exterior street. This allows a rethinking of the typical diagram of the hotel and a redisposition of its elements (lobby, restaurants, bedroom, etc.) towards a more coherent sequence of protocols.

Design Project – Ante-Room

The home as politcal space: Salon de Madame Geoffrin, Paris.

Design Project – Ante-Room

Accordingly, the design proposal starts with three general typological transformations; the corridor, the atrium and the arcade. By re-evaluating these three typical structural elements of the grand hotel, the proposal challenges the separation between public space and bedroom. Each of these elements is considered to establish a link between the bedrooms and their ante-rooms and larger public services, eventually challenging the role of the traditional lobby as a singular space placed in front of it. It is then that each transformation not only refers to the internal diagrammatic shift but starts to position the hotel within its particular urban context. Situated in Berlin, Paris and Brussels, each transformation reflects on the particular socio-economic and political context of the site by adapting its main structural elements and by providing context specific programmes. On a larger urban scale, each design not only questions the role of the hotel as a pivotal building type in the city but also capitalises on this fact by proposing three possible urban strategies of framing, infill and limit. Or to refer to the questions previously stated; each of these strategies deploys a potential regeneration of its site by referring to the hotel’s status as either a contained system (limit), an integral part (infill) or a juxtaposition (frame).

Typological Transformation

From Standardised to Customised Central to the design proposals, is the previously mentioned revision of domesticity in the hotel as a possibility to cater for more customized protocols of hospitality promoting the political agency of the hotel. Understanding hospitality as a process that always implies formality and thus never comes without forms of servicing, allows in this context to propose the most extreme form of domestic servicing – being hosted – as the design starting point for the reformulation of the hotel apartments. Based on the idea of the ante-room, the design proposes the transformation and extension of the traditional hotel room into a formal sequence of different customized formats of hospitality. Each project is based on three types of rooms different in size and function. The smallest module offers an additional study room to the bedroom, while the other two compromise kitchen, living or dining room. Each module follows a linear development in depth of the plan, gradually moving forward from more public areas to the most private, the bedroom. This sequencing entails formal protocols of hospitality in so far as it implies the possibility for the hotel guest to entertain other guests by guiding them from one event to the next. While this may create a conflict between private and public, between areas of retreat and those of public welcoming, it allows for the renegotiation of the prevailing separation of these things in the traditional hotel. Accordingly the layout complies with the managerial processes of catering and services, by giving direct access to the dining or living area. Through combination of these three basic modules, by linking their anterior rooms, larger ante-rooms are created, giving the option for bigger events and receptions. Accordingly combined modules provide joint conference rooms, group working spaces, dining rooms or reception areas.

Design Project – Ante-Room

Corridor

Arcade

Atrium

Typological Transformation

Design Project – Ante-Room

Corridor

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As the modern hotel has substituted forms of hospitality that did not exist in the home, by providing the possibility of formal encounter and socialisation through its services, it simultaneously did this by adapting domestic tropes, such as furniture layouts and styles. Disconnecting protocols of hospitality from the home, complied with the larger development of domesticity to separate the public from the private and work from reproduction. Consequently the modern home no longer provides any spatial formality for protocols of hospitality, but avoids the issue by entertaining guest in the kitchen or living room. The design proposal intends to become the re-imagination of the formalities of hospitality while recognizing the context of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s domestic practices, such as cooking for someone else. As such the hotel once again offers the potential to substitute the domestic for its averted and lost function, while at the same time recognizing the role of the domestic to cater for such ends.

Transformation of hotel rooms.

Overall the three designs suggest a radical reformulation of the hotel and its traditional separation of bedroom from conference or meeting rooms for the purpose of catering specifically for its user group. Besides reasoning the decision of linking bed and conference room as a pragmatic answer to potential user demands, the three designs moreover speculate upon it associations on a representative political and social level. This is important. As the political character of the hotel is not revealed in an explosion of controversy but rather in its subtle mechanisms to portray and subvert the ways in which we recognize its hosted activities, the particularities of its interplay between service staff, guest to guest relation and spatial disposition become critical. Referring to the notion of new media representation, the relation of intimacy and work has become an important asset of the daily political representation: photos of advisors and speech writers in hotel bedrooms preparing work have become as important as formal photographs of high ranked politicians and are equally propagated by government administrations. In this context the role of the hotel to formalise processes of hospitality becomes crucial. This also incudes the hotel service staff; while normally service staff in the hotel operates on an almost invisible level, here it can be imagined to function as a visible form of representation and identification which politics rely on. In this light the design of the extended bedrooms is submitted to the function of its representative character: the possibility for intimacy, exposure and occasional transparency. Typical hotel room

Design Project â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ante-Room

Standard study type

Standard salon type

Standard salon and dining type

Transformation of hotel rooms.

Design Project â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ante-Room

Standard study type

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1 Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1. 2 Conrad N. Hilton, Be My Guest (New York City: Fireside, 1984, first edition: 1957), 237. 3 For example: The investment capital of US$5 million for the Hilton Istanbul was shared by the Emekli Sandığı Turkish Pension Fund and the ECA with US$ 3 million and US$ 2 million respectively. Hilton was responsible for the operation costs and secured operation rights for 20 years, https.en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hilton_Istanbul.Bosphorus. 4 Sara Fregonese and Adam Ramadan: Hotel Geopolitics: A Research Agenda, Geopolitics, Vol. 20/4, 2015, 793-813. 5 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

London: John Murray, 1865). 22 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (AA Documents) (United Kingdom: Architectural Association Publications, 2005), 70-79. 23 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 24 Amy Milne-Smith, “A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 1880–1914,” The Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2006), 796-818.

(Cambridge ,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 173-185.

6 The term ‘subject’ refers to the definition given by Michael Hays: “Any reference to an individual self and its relation to ideological, institutional, and disciplinary apparatuses entails a concept of the subject that reaches beyond the particular person”, Michael K. Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 7. 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 1-56, 89-140. 8 Wolfgang Sonne, Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003). 9 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 40: “

‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expert management and administration”.

10 Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 11 Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 169-173.

12 Lisa Pfueller Davidson, “Early Twentieth-Century Hotel Architects and the Origins of Standardization”, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25, The American Hotel (2005), 73. 13 Ibid., 79. 14 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 1260. 15 Ibid., 843. 16 Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchinson, 1980). 17 Charles Rice, Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016), 7. 18 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/ iran-nuclear-deal-hotel-charity-concert (accessed: May 20, 2016). 19 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), xvii. 20 “A Day in the Life of Louis XIV - Palace of Versailles,” http://en.chateauversailles.fr/history/ versailles-during-the-centuries/living-at-the-court/aday-in-the-life-of-louis-xiv, (accessed May 30, 2016). 21 Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House or, How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press 2012, first publishing

Design Project – Ante-Room

The hotel as a stage for political representation: John F. Kennedy meeting with Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia in Carlyle Hotel New York 1961.

(Cambridge ,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 173-185.

‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expert management and administration”.

10 Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 11 Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 169-173.

Design Project – Ante-Room

The hotel as a stage for political representation: John F. Kennedy meeting with Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia in Carlyle Hotel New York 1961.

Design Projects

BERLIN

The series of three designs starts with the hotel in Berlin. Located south of Tiergarten, the area of the Lützowplatz constitutes a typical Berlin ensemble of disrupted historical tales and post-modern narratives forming a diverse urban context. The once square place with 5 storey buildings surrounding it, today presents itself as an infrastructural passage to the Tiergarten and Strasse des 17 Juni. Bordering the embassy quarter and the Bauhaus archive to the north, the area marks the southern border of the Tiergarten district including the German Parliamentary complex, the presidential residence Bellevue and the Potsdamer Platz. Defined by the multi-lane highway cutting through the areal, Lützowplatz itself has transformed into a wedge shaped park, hard to reach from the opposite street sides. The Platz is currently enclosed on three sides and open towards Landwehrkanal and the Tiergarten; with the Hotel Berlin defining the southern edge and mixed used residential and office buildings to the east and west. The design proposal, inverts the given situation by fully occupying the actual Lützowplatz with the hotel design thus allowing the current site of the Hotel Berlin to be turned into a park. No historical sentimentality. Tracing the perimeter of Lützowplatz, the hotel replicates the wedge form of the site. In doing so, the ill-defined Lützowplatz is regenerated as a meaningful site simultaneously functioning as a frame and clear perimeter to the created park in the south. This is compounded by the slab of the hotel exceeding the perimeter of the Lützowplatz south by cantilevering over the street and reaching out towards the newly created park. Already in 1977, on the occasion of a competition for the redesign of the Hotel Berlin, organised in cooperation with the Berlin council, the actual site of the Hotel Berlin and the Lützowplatz became subject to a redevelopment scheme. The 50

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competition brief, besides stating the hotel guidelines, also aimed at an integration and regeneration of the historical Lützowplatz through defining its perimeter with the new construction.1 In an attempt to restore what had inevitably got lost due to the principles of modern city planning, the jury choose O.M. Ungers’ design for its clear geometrical approach to the site and its interrelation with the direct context.2 The proposal was never realised, yet its design revealed a number of problems concerning the site and the particular planning of a hotel in its context. OMU’s proposal for the Hotel Berlin shows a rectangular block occupying the west of the provided site opposite Lützowplatz. The intention is formal and legible, almost too obvious to work; by first framing the Lützowplatz with a rectangular arcade of trees, intended to restore its disrupted shape to clarity, Ungers then replicated the exact size of the arcade on the provided plot as his actual hotel perimeter. While OMU’s explicit intent was to counteract the chaotic environment with a tranquil design it can be argued that the opposite has been achieved through the fragmentation of the site into two equal proportional figures and a rather unwanted triangle section to the east – made useful in the project description as a parking lot or with an apologetic additional apartment block.3 However central to Ungers’ ambition was to provide a valid update to the hotel typology – an honest attempt to question the possibility of a grand urban hotel today. This not only meant a revision of its architectural tropes but also its function as a public space. Ungers design makes the attempt to follow the tradition of grand urban hotels by integrating a circumferential arcade on the ground floor with shops and cafes as well as providing two interiorised courtyards, one conceptualised as a public urban plaza and the other as an interior garden accessible for hotel guests only. Following a similar intent to provide a building of public quality, the challenge for the design proposal is to negotiate its urban 51

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form against the idea of public access and circulation in the building. Accordingly internal layout of the hotel is challenged by the promise to replace Lützowplatz with a suitable function and program. To further strengthen the connection between hotel and park, the hotel is mainly accessed via a ramp from the park underpass to the site dividing the street and leading towards a lower ground-floor level. From here the ground floor of the hotel is conceived of as an open space that gradually develops into a continuous ramp ascending above street level towards the northern tip of the building. Providing a number of public programmes such as a library, restaurants, cafes, a gallery and exhibition spaces, the ground floor intends to function as an extended lobby to the hotel as well as to the city and its surrounding political as well as cultural institutions. Against the open lower section of the complex, its upper stories, the actual hotel, are conceived of as a monolithic horizontal slab, measuring 187m by 90m, floating above ground floor. The ambition of the project to establish a direct link between public services and the private apartments is challenged by the internal layout of the hotel. While mat-buildings such as the Freie Universität Berlin (1963) or Frankfurt Römerberg (1963) show a compositional network of dominant corridors, a flexible megastructure , that expands form the inside to the outside like the sprawling grid of an American city grid, the hotel Berlin establishes a clear boundary, a frame, through the instalment of a continuous circumferential corridor on the perimeter of the building. Conceived as an interior street, the corridor of 3m width not only serves as an infrastructural element but is utilized as the actual lobby of the hotel: smaller and larger setbacks widening the corridor up to 13 meter provide a number of programs such as restaurants, lecture spaces, libraries or event areas. As a public accessible space, the corridor interiorizes the notion of Ungers’ exterior ground floor arcade as a trope of grand urban hotels, without the risk of its redundancy as a result of its lack of integration into the broader urban context. Instead the adjacent rooms link directly to the corridor and its public services, contributing to its stimulation as an interiorised street. Here events directly cater for the rooms and vice versa, the guests of the rooms can make direct use of its services. From the fringes of the corridor the hotel plan develops into the deep plan as a series of room clusters, each rectangular in format while different in room-type composition. Contrary to the predominance of the grid in mat buildings, the internal layout of the Hotel Berlin is defined by the single room module and its subsequent composition into larger clusters.

1 Information retained by the author from various material in the Ungers archive Cologne. 2 “Aktueller Wettbewerb: Wettbewerb Hotel Berlin, Berlin”, Bauen + Wohnen 32, no. 4 (1978), 173-176. 3 Information from Ungers archive Cologne.

Mat-building: Candilis,Josic, Woods, 1963 Frankfurt-Römerberg competition entry.

Lützowplatz before WWII.

O.M.U. Hotel Berlin Lützowplatz, 1977

The interiorisation of the arcade as a corridor and the provision of an extended open lobby space on the ground floor, poses the question: how can the hotel as a private commercial project, serve and substitute the notion of public and political space in the city? And furthermore what role has the domestic in establishing gradual boundaries of public and private engagement, making politics public or private? Corridor as street: Candilis,Josic, Woods, 1963 Frankfurt-Römerberg

Mat-building: Candilis,Josic, Woods, 1963 Frankfurt-Römerberg competition entry.

Lützowplatz before WWII.

O.M.U. Hotel Berlin Lützowplatz, 1977

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PARIS

The second design is for a hotel in Paris located at the very end of the axe historique, behind La Defense in the borough of Nanterre and in close proximity to the Université Paris-OuestNanterre-La Défense. Prior to the 1960’s and the development of La Defense administrative quarter, the area marked the most underdeveloped hinterlands of Paris. A 20 years redevelopment scheme for the area was proposed in 2009 under the direction of the EPADESA1, a developer of the state and successor of the former state developer of La Defense EPAD.2 Concerned with the identity and consistency of the axe, the proposed scheme suggests the integration of La Defense through an extension of the axis from the Grand Arch de La Defense to the banks of the Seine. With this, the EPADESA follows a decision that already had been made with the erection of the Grand Arch de La Defense in the 1989. Back then the option was given to finish the axis with the monumental structure. The result became a half-hearted decision compromised mainly by the fact that the initial intention to use the building as a frame for the axis had become obscure after it was discovered that the foundation of the building could not be placed in parallel to the axis but had to be shifted sidewards, eventually leaving the axis ill-defined. While the current EPADESA scheme attempts to restore the axis after La Defense by defining its sides with multi storey buildings, it fails to do so when the axis once again makes a slight turn towards the south and eventually reaching the Seine.

hotels that often occupied central locations in the city such as train stations or public plazas. Acknowledging the importance of the axis to the political representation of Paris ruling powers, the hotel deliberately joins the series of axis monuments, that can be read as symptoms of historical and contemporary political systems. However it does so, with the knowledge of its weakened significance after La Defense. While the Arc de Triumphe in the centre of Paris still represents the political system of Napoleon, La Defense clearly indicates the shift towards a society governed by an administrative system. In actual fact, the Arch de la Defense is nothing but a monumental office building housing government and commercial offices.

The design proposes a clear limitation of the axis. It does so by placing the hotel, a two-part cube measuring 60x60x50 meter in total on the roundabout that defines the axi’s point of curvature. Towering the surrounding buildings, the central location of the hotel is not a sign of arrogance but intends to challenge the role of the hotel as a pivotal building to the organisation of the urban context. As such it follows traditional models of grand urban

The general organisation of the building follows a simple two-part diagram; a lower 3 storey section containing offices, co-working space, cafeteria, galleries and the hotel reception and an upper 9 storey section containing the actual hotel. The atrium functions as a shared lobby and circulation for both parts. By expanding the circulation into larger platforms, stairs or even rooms, it prevents the atrium from becoming just a hollow void

While La Defense’s administrative complex is characterized by high density, the ESPADESA redevelopment scheme around the axis is characterized by middle scale developments. This is contrasted by an excessive use of public green space with a total length of 3,2km along the axis. As in this context, any attempt to provide external space to the vast urban landscape becomes redundant, the hotel challenges the notion of an interiorised urban space. This function is appointed to a central atrium space, measuring 20x30m, which connects the two sections of the building through vertical circulation. Lifted above ground the first floor of the hotel is reached from the promenade via a stair, entering the atrium from beneath and turning the horizontal movement into a vertical one.

PARIS

of spectacle, a common problem of atriums in which the ground floor consumes all public program. Instead the platforms inhabit various public services that directly relate to the adjacent rooms facing the atrium space on each level. While the atrium forms the inner core and circulation of the hotel, a second layer of rooms defines the outer surface of the building. Albeit in a more restrained way, the corridor in between the two layers follows the principle of the Berlin corridor by forming larger and smaller pockets hosting additional conference spaces and services. The overall intention of the proposal is the negotiation of an interiorised urban space versus the hotel’s pivotal position within the city as a landmark and proper civic institution. Or in other words, if the Hilton hotels were gaining their political relevance on a geopolitical scale though their direct confrontation with another culture, what is the equivalent conflict, what is the political conflict that arises on an urban scale? Arche de la Défense

Axis: View towards East and la Défense.

1 Établissement public d’aménagement de la Défense Seine Arche. 2 Etablissement public d’aménagement de La Défense, “Territoire - les études Urbaines à Grande échelle,” http://www.epadesa.fr/un-territoirestrategique/les-etudes-urbaines-epadesa.html, (accessed May 28, 2016). EPADESA development scheme.

Axis: View towards East and la Défense.

1 Arc de Triomphe 2 La DÃ©fense 3 Hotel Paris

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Atrium space .

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BRUSSELS

While the first and second designs were freestanding edifices employing urban strategies of framing and limiting, the third design is developed as an infill strategy. Situated directly in the centre of the Leopold Quarter in Brussels, home to major EU institutions, the proposal capitalises on the proximity and reliance on such institutions for the operative business of the hotel â&#x20AC;&#x201C; owing its constituency. The site reveals a dual condition, facing the large scale developed and car dominated Rue de La Roi to the north while confronted with a small grain structure of single family houses and a smaller street to the south. This situation is compounded by an incline of the terrain by almost 5 meters from the northern to the southern edge. The small size of the site, measuring approximately 70x80 m, requires a complete occupation for developing an economic feasible footprint of the building. Confronted with the problem of a dual accessibility, the design proposes the introduction of an arcade into the design with the objective to function as both as lobby and as a public passage, connecting the two streets. The spatial diagram of the hotel describes a three-part division of the complex; the ground floor occupied by office spaces, the 3 storey middle section forming the actual hotel, and a continuation of ground floor plan as office towers above. The provision of proportionally large amounts of office space is intended to assume responsibility for the recent practices of office development by the private sector in the European Quarter, which has produced a city scape of generic office buildings that exude an air of exclusivity and by consequence an impermeable boundary condition that separates user from nonuser.1 This contextual urban strategy is intended to revalidate the use of office space for the European Union, which so far has relied largely on the offices provided by the private sector even for its representative premises.

By proposing a shared hotel-office lobby, the design responds to the problem of an alienated ground floor condition of the surrounding office buildings. Thus following the example of the previous two designs, the arcade is transformed from its traditional linearity into a meandering passage opening up to larger interior atriums. Each of the 5 atriums provides service infrastructures such as libraries or auditoriums on the ground floor implementing public activities into the office lobbies. While the ground floor articulates the tension between public representation and exposed commercial usage, the middle section retreats from public exposition and turns towards the domestic hotel layout presented in the previous designs. The design explores the potential of the hotel to substitute the role of proper political institutions by capitalising upon their reliance on the private sector to develop their institutional premises. In doing so, the hotel offers the possibility to implement and combine those protocols of daily political practice that require a generic administrative context (office) with the specific routines of domestic hospitality it has become so heavily reliant on. How then can we understand the political space of the hotel as different from the official political space and accordingly how do we conceive the domestic as a new political space?

1 Carola Hein, The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (London: Praeger, 2004).

BRUSSELS

1 Carola Hein, The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (London: Praeger, 2004).

European Quarter and administrative buildings of the European Union.

Charlemagne building - European Commission

Berlaymont building - seat of the European Commission.

Rue de la Loi - European Quarter.

Justus Lipsius building - seat of the Council of the European Union.

European Quarter and administrative buildings of the European Union.

Charlemagne building - European Commission

Berlaymont building - seat of the European Commission.

Rue de la Loi - European Quarter.

Justus Lipsius building - seat of the Council of the European Union.

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1 Hotel Brussels 2 European Parliament 3 Berlaymont building

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1 Hotel Brussels 2 European Parliament 3 Berlaymont building

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Design proposal infil, isometric visualisation.

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Site plan

Design proposal infil, isometric visualisation.

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Office level

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9 Restaurant 10 Conference apartment 11 Co-working apartment

Arcade Auditorium Library Cafe lobby Lobby Co-working Office Restaurant

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9 Restaurant 10 Conference apartment 11 Co-working apartment

Arcade Auditorium Library Cafe lobby Lobby Co-working Office Restaurant

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Axonometry showing ground floor level (arcade), hotel level and office level.

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Axonometry showing ground floor level (arcade), hotel level and office level.

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Section A -B 1 2 3 4

Office level Hotel level Office level Rue de La Loi

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View from bed room into conference room. 0

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Design Brussels - typical plan

Design Berlin - typical plan

Design Paris - typical plan

Design Brussels - typical plan

Design Berlin - typical plan

Design Paris - typical plan

Public Homes

Since their conception hotels have always produced and have been the projection surface of particular images of publicity and likewise represented a public sphere. As such they have been sites of political controversy and confrontation as was illustrated by Ruth Craggs in the case of hotels in Southern Rhodesia between 1858 and 1962 as spaces of the racial segregation and resistance, promoting a particular notion of European sociability.1 While hotels like the Hilton made use of this potential on a geopolitical scale as a form of confrontation between rival ideologies, the three design proposals presented here aim to engage on a much smaller urban scale in order to confront the current condition of political practice, its post-democratic organisation or better said, it’s lack of organisation of administrative work which has produced a lack of representative grounds. Claiming the title of a political institution the hotel confronts that which is not yet formalised by any institution at the moment. However, the projects are not about revealing what is hidden or making visible what is naturally opaque but rather unfolding the latent wish of these processes to be formalised within a domestic setting. As such the three designs have to be read as a constant negotiation between spaces of publicity and enclosure, between exposure and intimacy, responding to the political protocols of 3rd party negotiations, sub-dealers, lobbyists and politicians. The raison d’ être for addressing these practices and their organisational protocols is first the proliferation of the hotel on an urban scale as a public institution or civic building. This poses the question of the hotel’s ability to provide public space and its qualities of serving a public sphere. In this respect each of the three design proposals acts as a particular strategic instigator of public space through its urban disposition and architectural diagram. However, their urban disposition is not of a principally contextual nature to the city but has to be read as a strategic placement

Public Homes

Private property as public spce - the Palais Royale (Palais-Cardinal) 1641

Camille Desmoulins´call to arms, the day before the stoming of the Bastille.

Public Homes

Private property as public spce - the Palais Royale (Palais-Cardinal) 1641

Camille Desmoulins´call to arms, the day before the stoming of the Bastille.

of the hotel to accentuate its political ambition as a pivotal, civic building. Thus the urban strategies of frame, limit and infill and the broader context of this relationship between proposal and city is fundamentally a political one. “‘Politics constitutes the problem of choices’. Who ultimately chooses the image of a city if not the city itself – and always and only through its political institutions. To say that this choice is indifferent is a banal simplification of the problem. It is not indifferent: Athens, Rome, and Paris are the form of their politics, the signs of their collective will. ”2 Cities today are planned and developed in large part by the private sector. They have become symptomatic of a condition in which market economies and single interests prevail over democratic sense or collective interests. Drawing upon this notion, Aldo Rossi’s idea of a collective will has to be critically viewed as being somewhat idealistic or simplified. While it is true that the city reflects the status of its underlying political system, it does so in an implicit way as a symptom of its forms of administration and economics. This is evident in what is probably the most prominent epitome of political will in city planning: the design of public space. As ambiguous as the notion of what public space is, it is equally complex is its relation to shifts of political and economic governance. While today public space is often identified and confused with free accessible areas and generally taken as owned by the public, it’s actual ownership is often private. This is contrasted by the means through which historical examples of political power shaped the public realm. For instance, the design of the Place Royale (today Place Vosges) in 1612 and the Place Dauphine in 1642 were the explicit attempt to reorganize the city of Paris as a public and economic space under the rule of Henry IV.3 In the modern city such intentions have been increasingly transferred and identified with the commercial strategies of the private sector. One notable example of this is Mies van der Rohe’s Segram Building in New York, which provides exterior public space to the otherwise dense grid of the city. The possibility of the public sector to engage with the development of public space is therefore mainly given through its provision of landownership to developers and operators of hotel chains. Thus the three proposals, as part of one operating chain, are conceived as fully private owned and operated developments. However, it is possible to envision a common contract of public private partnership between local councils and hotel operators and developers that secure utilisation rights for the provision of landownership. In the case of the hotel in Brussels this becomes a viable option, in which the operator of the hotel can speculate upon the EU as a constant host or tenant. In this sense the pivotal role of the hotel as a space of politics, gaining its representational relevance as part of a fabricated imagery of a public sphere, is not weakened but rather can be compared to the case of the Palais Royale in Paris around 1800.4 Here, the privately owned property of the Palais became the focus of Parisian life and its most vital expression after its owner Louis-Philippe II had turned it into a speculative project with cafes, bookshops, salons and brothels, hosted under the roof of the first commercial arcade. The particular rights granted to Louis-Philippe II, to ban the police form the property, allowed for its distinctive

Public Homes

Public space on private ground: Seagram Building., New York

Public Homes

Public space on private ground: Seagram Building., New York

Public Homes

public sphere to emerge. The Palais Royale and its arcades not only gained wider prominence through Walter Benjamin’s seminal Arcades Project, illustrating the modern flâneur, but especially for its role within the origin of the French revolution.5 While the hotel proposal in Berlin makes reference to this idea on a bigger scale through its extensive provision of space for various cultural and commercial activities on the ground floor, each proposal finds a strategic answer to the notion of public space through its particular elements of corridor, atrium or passage. In doing so, the proposals recognize the need for politics to identify with this instance of publicity, its creation of cultural identity, subjectivity and sociability. The practices of door step interviews, ceremonial openings, public announcements or group photoshoots is embedded and given space within this context. Or in other words referring back to the domestic model of the ante-room and its protocols of hospitality, the corridor, atrium or arcade signify the first instance of welcoming – its most public and representative segment. As such each of the three elements, develops a form of intermediate interior urban space that sets up the relation to the subsequent protocols of more private spatial settings. Furthermore each of the elements, makes visible the service structure of the hotel, that normally operates on a hidden layer: By disregarding a clear separation of service corridors from the public space, the hotel staff operates on a visible level as part of a representative sphere that politics can identify with. It is precisely in this condition, that the hotel becomes an alternative form of representation to official political institutions such as the parliament, without inadvertently being bound to the exclusivity of its formal protocols.

Generic Street - Alison and Peter Smithon, Golden Lane project.

The arcade as a model for an interior generic street. Palais-Royale 1815

Public Homes

For instance, the corridor in the hotel Berlin, conceived as an urban interior street, exposes the relation of public activities, such as dining or receptions by integrating those functions into the corridor layout. Following Frampton, the intention of this is according to Alison and Peter Smithson “the idea of the generic street; that is, of a street that may not be recognizable as such but would have, nonetheless, many of the psychosocial attributes of the traditional street”.6 While the Smithsons’ Golden Lane project was criticised by Kenneth Frampton for its lack of a convincing idea on how the idea of a generic street could be realised within the “abstract context of motopia”7, the proposal holds on to the Smithsons’ notion of the generic street as an “arena for social expression”8. However, as Frampton identified the relative failure of the generic street in Golden Lane on its single-loaded access – disregarding the essential characteristics of a street, namely its doublesidedness – the proposal builds on this criticism arguing it is in fact a broader problem of programmatic emptiness. In fact, Frampton further argues with the examples of Candilis, Josic and Woods’ plan for the university of Bochum and Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project amongst others for the limited integration and internalisation of the street into architectural structures.9 Having the benefit of the lobby in the hotel, the corridor is able to cater for those services, traditionally associated or linked to the lobby. Yet, its fundamental difference to a traditionally enclosed hotel lobby lies in the shift of its created social expression from an identification with a generic corporate lobby environment, to the possibility of identifying directly with the domesticity of the apartment and its related services.

Public Homes

Generic Street - Alison and Peter Smithon, Golden Lane project.

The arcade as a model for an interior generic street. Palais-Royale 1815

Public Homes

Calling to mind the photograph of Helmut Kohl standing in front of the Kanzler Bungerlow in Bonn with the living room as its backdrop, the intention for a different representative environment becomes clear: the renegotiation of the threshold between public and private in the hotel. Albeit a different spatial formulation, due to the urban situation and context as stated above, the proposals of the atrium in Paris and the arcade in Brussels follow a similar urban and interior intention. While the former picks up on the concept of the atrium hotel as famously developed by John Portman and extends his notion of interior urban space through an expansion throughout the vertical axis of the atrium, the latter directly refers to Frampton’s reference of the arcade as a possibility to integrate the qualities of an urban street into a building. However their spatial formulations create differences on account of the representational qualities of exposure and intimacy. As Rem Koolhaas pointed out, John Portman’s hollow hotel atriums created hermetic interiors that could be perceived as modern panopticons. While one might consider this to be a negative aspect of the atrium, in the context of media centred politics of representation it becomes a useful asset and powerful stage for political representation. In contrast to the atrium, the arcade or corridor perform stronger on the idea of a discreet and selective imagery of domestic representation. In short, all three proposals reframe the hotel’s function as a public institution through both, its strategic placement on an urban scale as well as its use of a representational publicness through a reformulation of the relation of lobby to the domestic threshold of the apartment and services.

Hollow atrium: John Portman‘s Marriot Atlanta Hotel and Hyatt Regency San Francisco

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Hollow atrium: John Portman‘s Marriot Atlanta Hotel and Hyatt Regency San Francisco

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Public Homes

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Domestic Politics

Privacy: Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos accidentally exposes key negotiation tactics written on a hotel notepad to the international press at an EU summit in the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels.

In his book The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett writes about the effects that open-floor office plans and the consequent disappearance of walls in architecture have had on sociability between people: “People are more sociable, the more they have some tangible barriers between them, just as they need specific places in public whose sole purpose is to bring them together. Let us put this another way again: Human beings need to have some distance from intimate observation by others in order to feel sociable. Increase intimate contact and you decrease sociability. Here is the logic of one form of bureaucratic efficiency.”10 Hotels, probably more than any other buildings, master the articulation between intimacy and exposure, between private and public and as a matter of fact largely capitalise on its potential for producing different formats of socialisation. Likewise politics constitute a constant play between exposing information, people or objects at one moment and the non-disclosure of these for strategic purpose at another. The oscillation between the poles of work and representation constitutes the daily routines of its practice. A fine line, that if crossed can cause political turmoil. A noteworthy example of this occurred, on the 7th of July 2015, in the middle of the Greek dept crisis. The newly appointed Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos accidentally exposed key negotiation tactics which were written on a hotel notepad to the international press at an EU summit in the Justus Lipsius building – seat of the EU council in Brussels. While the media were almost exclusively preoccupied with the revealed tactics, which in turn led to a small scandal, only peripheral comments were made about the fact that the notes were written on a notepad from the Hotel – a four star €170-a-night lodgings in Brussels.11 Carrying the hotel notepad into the public media arena of the council revealed what was meant to be private and moreover it exposed its place of origin – the hotel – as the site of

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Domestic Politics

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Domestic Politics

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political work and production. What this demonstrates however, is that it obviously failed to provide a vital spatial supply for the conference to take place in the hotel itself, preventing the minister from exposing his negotiation tactics or in other words preventing the private material to be accidentally exposed to the public. In fact, the only place where the possibility of intimacy is provided for in the modern hotel is the isolated private bedroom and this stands in contrast to the direct and immediate full public exposure in the lobby, conference rooms or restaurants. Notably, images of briefings or meetings often show politicians in the private environment of their apartment livingroom or bedroom. By contrast the lobby, where furniture landscapes have replaced all clear distinctions of privacy, any barrier for socialisation is now absent. The voyeuristic exposure of guest to guest relationship in the lobby has therefore equally prevented more elaborate formats of hospitality: the possibility to host and be hosted. By constrast, the predominance of commercial interests binds the guests of the hotel to the use of its profitable service infrastructure as the only ground for socialisation. If as previously described, formats of hospitality are facilitated by particular domestic layouts and at the same time hospitality is the modus operandi through which the threshold between public and private can be negotiated, it is precisely here, that the three design proposals claim a radical reformulation of domesticity in the hotel. Drawing on the notion of the barrier as an instigator of sociability and intimacy, the idea of the ante-room becomes the spatial expression of barriers as a sequence of walls articulating the transgression from the inside to the outside. The intimacy of the bedroom gets expanded with spaces for different formats of socialisation that require the intimacy of the domestic and thus cannot be found in the current hotel with its vast lobbies and mono functional conference rooms. This enables a level of control over the relation of political work and subsequent publication as well as its need for protocols of hospitality that include forms of negotiation with other parties over conference tables or dinner. While larger political conventions require larger conference halls and auditoriums, the design proposals instead refer to the small scale events of daily, often mundane political practice, the work of researchers and advisors meeting before passing on the material to the key figures of political representation. Thus the hotel as the extended office of a bureaucratic complex not only includes the working of a single isolated prominent politician on his strategy but also and perhaps more importantly, the routines of his whole entourage of advisors, speech writers and secretaries. Accordingly the three designs propose a number of different constellations of apartments that mirror the working of different groups within the political complex. This includes single study rooms next to library facilities for researchers, co-working apartments for smaller delegations and larger apartment configurations for conferences and sociable meetings. The larger clustering of these modules into a mat-building layout and its juxtaposition to the elements of corridor, arcade and atrium make an explicit move away from the linear double loaded corridor model of the traditional hotel. This seemingly simple strategy is intended to provoke forms of intimacy within the plan that allow for a duplicitous setting; publicity when needed and privacy if wanted. 104

Domestic Politics

Plan extract from hotel Berlin.

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Domestic Politics

Plan extract from hotel Berlin.

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For instance it can be imagined that a smaller delegation of researchers prepare material in an apartment’s working room before meeting with another party in the adjacent conference room for negotiations and closing a deal over dinner in the provided dining room. The privacy of the bedroom or anterior rooms allow for the negotiating partners to withdraw from the talks for consultation or refreshment. The formality that such routines require is provided through the domestic layout of the apartment. In this sense, its protocols of hospitality do not follow the grandeur of big state ceremonies but rather the more grounded possibility of being hospitable to someone else. In this context the notion of service becomes an integral part of the design and equally part of its representational political sphere. While usually hotel guests are served in the hotel’s own high standard restaurants or bars, the designs propose direct room servicing as its standard form of service. This shift follows a double intention. First, the possibility to explore more formal protocols of hospitality within the domestic setting of the apartment, which then, second, become part of the formal and representational imagery that politics frequently rely on. The design relies on the tension that arises from the potential which the domestic layout enables; namely, the ability to be hosted on one hand, while at the same time, enabling the ability to host. Something that traditional hotels do not cater for. The role of service in this is to enable these different formats of hospitality according to a customized grade of formality: the dinner party, a diplomats meeting, an after meeting snack etc. The agency of the design proposals to function as representational environments for politics also implies references to its material culture and design. For instance Hilton’s use of materials associated with the architectural tropes of international– style architecture and modern technology clearly represented the socio-economic sphere of the western world. A strategy that was also used on the other side of the Iron Curtain by the Soviet government to propagate an idealised image of economic strength and modernity to international and western tourists. In fact the Soviet Council of Ministers planned the construction of fifty-four new hotels in Estonia in 1964 for the sole purpose of importing hard currency through tourism. The hotels imitated western architectural icons such as the Radisson SAS in Copenhagen but yet could not completely hide their cultural belonging. As a result, their interior design reflects a dependence on international modernism while revealing moments of Soviet chic through dark-brown ceramic tiles and varnishedoak wall panels. The agency of the design proposals to function as representational environments for politics implies a number of references to its material culture and design. For instance, Hilton’s use of materials which were heavily associated with the architectural tropes of international–style and modern technology clearly represented and mirrored the socio-economic sphere of the Western world and society. This strategy was also used on the other side of the Iron Curtain by the Soviet government to propagate an idealised image of economic strength and modernity to international and Western tourists.12 In fact, in 1964, the Soviet

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Domestic Politics

Public Public

Private Private

Functional diagram of modern hotel with free floor plan - no barriers.

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Public Public

Private Private

Functional diagram of modern hotel with free floor plan - no barriers.

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Council of Ministers planned the construction of fifty-four new hotels in Estonia for the sole purpose of importing hard currency through tourism: the buildings imitated Western architectural icons such as the Radisson SAS in Copenhagen, but could not completely hide their cultural belonging. As a result, their interior design reflected a dependence on international modernism, while revealing moments of Soviet chic through dark-brown ceramic tiles and varnished-oak wall panels. Politics have nowadays largely adapted and identified its means of representation to the most mundane and quotidian lifestyles and material culture, among which domesticity plays a key role. In an epoch where informal protocols have been so heavily associated with traditional formal gatherings, contexts and social positions to physically become the main representative of certain, precise political standpoints, the hotel has started to ostensibly reflect this very specific materiality. Since December 12, 1985, when 37-year-old Green Party politician Joschka Fischer was sworn in as Minister of State for Environment in the State Parliament of Hessen, Germany, while wearing casual pants and Nike sneakers, history has proven that everything can be turned into a political and representational symbol. As those shoes were unconventionally and shockingly taken into the parliamentary framework, the hotel has started to symbolise the contemporary domination by purely symbolic statutes. While constantly satisfying the longing for gestures with a major emotional impact on every communicational level, it has employed the hotelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spatial features for convey messages commanded by reassuring and immediately understandable protocols. Just like the hotel embodies certain instances, the materials chosen in the three design proposals adhere to the iconography employed in high profile buildings such as the New Court Rothschild Bank in London by OMA. While high quality constituents such as travertine stone, concrete and glass â&#x20AC;&#x201C; materials traditionally found in the administrative architecture - deck out the outside, the interiors are smooth and modern: as Fischerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoes conveyed the message that the traditional body of the politician had fallen, these prove that, in an increasingly globalized and dynamic world, there is no need anymore for formalised architectural spaces and settings, but that revisiting the hotel as a political institution throughout common and domestic social codex of normality can challenge its inner workings and fast-moving.

Modern political representation: Joschka Fischer is sworn in as Minister while wearing casual pants and Nike sneakers.

OMA New Court Rothschild Bank, London

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Modern political representation: Joschka Fischer is sworn in as Minister while wearing casual pants and Nike sneakers.

OMA New Court Rothschild Bank, London

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The Hotel as a Political Institution

The central ambition of this research has revolved around the reappraisal of the modern hotel through its use of domesticity as a political project and political institution in its own right. As previously outlined with the role model embodied by the Hilton hotels and the analysis of the traditional home as a place for sociable meetings, domesticity forms a socio-spatial category through which particular subjectivities and formal protocols of hospitality can be shaped. Thus the hotel actively gains its political relevance through the use of this formative potential for different political ends: while in the Hilton case study this meant the moulding of a little America’s imaginary and iconography aimed at challenging communism, each of the three design projects suggests the reformulation of the hotel into a cater for the inner working of an administrative political complex. Whereas the former served a conflict on a geopolitical scale, the latter confronts the existing tension in today’s political institutions to conform with democratic representation, besides actually representing a bureaucratic administrative complex. This congenital tension is compounded by the fact that, despite contemporary self-styled ‘postdemocratic’ political organisation has started to identify itself largely with the domestic for representation, it has not yet consistently provided a proper setting for this within the traditional political institutions. As the contemporary hotel has failed to address this condition in any other form but a very provisional one without a particular interest to its political constituency, the three designs embrace the potential of the domestic as an agent to subvert this situation. From the internal re-organisation of the hotel-apartment as a sequence of domestic ante-rooms, the three designs develop a typological reasoning allowing to invert the traditional role of the lobby as the exclusive public space against the notion of the hotel room as the quintessential private condition. In doing so, each design follows a typological transformation and overall strategy that find their peculiar

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Modern governmental work: Briefing and speech writing in hotel room.

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The Hotel as a Political Institution

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Modern governmental work: Briefing and speech writing in hotel room.

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implementation in the urban context as corridor, atrium or arcade. For all these reasons, the political relevance of each design should not be solely read in the direct relation to its urban and socio-economic context, but as part of a larger strategic exploitation of the hotel as a site for the working of an international operating political class. Each design encapsulates the managerial structures of a modern hotel chain – the repetition of its singular elements: this allows the hotel to perform as a perennial structure across cities and nations, installing a referential system of representational protocols and forms that eventually constitute its essence as a proper institution. In this sense, the three proposed designs amount to the starting point of what could be an internationally operating chain. Yet, each design contains what in the core constitutes its political character: the reformulation of protocols of hospitality through its domestic layout. Although the designs primarily focus on the reformulation of domesticity within the hotel’s spatial dimension, their actual scope reaches beyond its physical borders. Operating as the projection surface of people’s imagination, the hotel has always provided an arena for reflection on the way one lives: that is why domesticity does not merely represent the means through which the hotel can be reformulated in its political agency, as this reciprocally allows and encourages to reflect upon new domestic formats. As the American hotel of the late Nineteenth Century served as a key model of domestic hospitality for the modern apartment building, the design proposals allow to reverse the question and inquire after how the domestic is currently requiring a new formal.13 The modern home is characterized by its complete isolation from the public and by its connotation as a space for privacy and reproduction: through this demarcate separation between home and work, and between private and public respectively, the private home has lost its spatial protocols of hospitality that earlier hotels referred to. However, in the last few decades, this split between home and work has become increasingly blurred due to technological and social shifts. With the mixing of these two spheres the clear delimitation between what is private and what is public does not find a spatial response in the home. Instead, the kitchen or dining room have become multipurpose spaces for private as well as public matters of meeting and socialisation. The design proposals allow the re-imagination of and the reflection on formal protocols of hospitality for the home. Thus the design projects offer a reformulation of the definition of domesticity that is not based on the separation of public from private, but on a syntactic combination of both – namely the careful reimplementation of the public within the private. The hotel reflects on this possibility for the home to regenerate as a space of formal hospitality – proposing an alternative model of working and living in the home through the clear definition of boundaries and protocols. The hotel as a political institution therefore not only reflects upon the organisation of our public political life, but likewise on its counter part: the private. After all, with politics increasingly identifying with and sharing the private for representation, these two spheres might not be worth separating.

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1 Ruth Craggs, “Towards a Political Geography of Hotels: Southern Rhodesia, 1958–1962,” Political Geography 31, no. 4 (May 2012), doi:10.1016/j. polgeo.2012.02.002. 2 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 11th ed. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984), 162. 3 Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991). 4 Andrew Ayers, The Architecture of Paris (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004), 47-49. 5 Johann Friedrich Geist, Passagen, Ein Bautyp des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: Prestel-Verlag, 1978),107-109. 6 Kenneth Frampton, “The Generic Street as a Continuous Built Form,” in On Streets: Streets as Elements of Urban Structure, ed. Stanford Anderson (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986), 309. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 310. 9 Also see: Charles Rice, Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 110-112. 10 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin Books, 2002),15. 11 “Greece’s New Finance Minister Has to Remind Himself: ‘No triumphalism’”, The Guardian, July 8, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ jul/07/greeces-new-finance-minister-has-to-remindhimself-no-triumphalism, (accessed May 5, 2016). 12 Andres Kurg, “The Viru Hotel, Tallinn, Modernist in Form, Late Socialist in Content”, in Hotel Lobbies and Lounges: The Architecture of Professional Hospitality, edited by Anne Massey and Tom Avermaete (London: Routledge, 2013), 178–185. 13 Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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Ante-room concept image: Corridor | Ante-room | Bed room

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