FINAL REPORT
„HOTEL FUTURE“
Architecture Talks Lucerne - 24 & 25 June 2005
at the Culture & Convention Centre, Lucerne
Hotel Future: Constructed and Conceived.
The Architecture Talks Lucerne provided a good sequence along which the
“Hotel Future” must proceed in Western latitudes in order to be
successful in the knowledge of how to live today in a Europe that is
being overrun by the Chinese economic model, where growth is proceeding
four times as rapidly as here.
Today the hotel resembles increasingly a residential labyrinth for
travellers. The design hotel assimilates the aspirations and hopes of
people who are in transit. The hotel has become the intersection in a
globalised world, where mobility is gaining increasingly in importance.
Yet in its different form of expression it has also become a Gordian
knot that it is up to the future to solve. Luxury hotel, boutique
hotel, avant-garde temple versus mass accommodations? The first
Architecture Talks, which took place on the 24th and 25th of June at
the Culture and Convention Centre Lucerne, illustrated the various
paths architects and designers have taken in the definition of the
Hotel Future.
After Donald Albrecht, curator of the New York
exhibition, “New Hotels for Global Nomads”, gave an introduction to the
biography of the hotel from Cesar Ritz to Alfred Hitchcock, Matteo Thun
called for more sensitive handling of the locations where hotels rise.
He appealed for respect for nature: “We must be aware that landscape
contributes to the shaping of local cultures and represents a
fundamental element of the European natural and cultural heritage, thus
contributing to the well-being of human beings and to the European
identity.” His Alpine resort hotel, “Vigilius” is a good example of how
far the Milan architect can think outside the four walls of
construction. Thomas Willemeit of Graft Architects, which has offices
in Berlin and Los Angeles, made their Berlin “Q!” Hotel the focus of
his presentation. The new hotel burst the bounds of our powers of the
imagination. There an interior is treated as if it were a landscape.
The entrance resembles a Mediterranean sea promenade with cubatures
that flow into one another. The hotel project in the desert landscape
of Palm Springs illustrates how they work with natural conditions: with
a kind of fold architecture that assimilates the topography of the land
to be built upon. The ‘underwater architect’, Joachim Hauser, who is
building the “Hydropolis” Hotel in Dubai on the ocean bed at a depth of
29 meters, was muzzled initially by the investors without further ado.
After a battle lasting six years, he could report that the “Hydropolis”
is now definitely being built. Paul Lewis from the New York team,
Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, sketched how awful staying anywhere is for bus
travellers and presented an interesting solution. He sees hotel
buildings along the main traffic arteries from the north to the south
of Europe, which from the outside happen along like airport
architecture, that is, modern and puristic. Yet inside the guests
should be offered an air of the country to which the travellers are
enroute. The light designer most in demand worldwide, Arnold Chan, who
at the moment is illuminating the Madrid Hotel Puerto América, a work
of 18 star architects from Ron Arad to Zaha Hadid, took issue a little
with his position as a light designer: “If a building reaps hymns of
praise, then the architect always stands in the limelight. The light
designer must bear the brunt of a scathing review.”
About Ten Square Meter Residential Cells and a Pop Star
“Yotel” and Gerard Greene in particular, director and founding member,
is more than convinced about his idea: “In an era when, for example,
one can put out up to 200 euros for a night in an average hotel, our
project is a product of increasing need for accommodations that one can
afford on a small budget. The rooms will be tiny, but comfortable, like
a stateroom on a luxury yacht.” This is how Gerard Greene envisions the
hotel future. “Due to the module-like design, our concept can be
realised at the airport, on the roof of a house or also under a
bridge.”
With Karim Rashid, the ultimate shooting star of the design scene,
Architecture Talks provided an unequalled highlight. Accompanied by the
music of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” from Deodato, he appeared upon the
stage and began a verbal fireworks without period or comma: “I have
designed everything...from a spoon to the house, from shampoo packaging
to furniture, from fitness objects to all-inclusive corporate design.
And yet the basis is always the same, simple.” What he meant by that:
“Our motivations should focus around our conscious collective memory
and a desire to fill it with ideas that move between art and life. As
art takes its ideas from everyday life and I hope that everyday life
will take its ideas from art....” For Ilse Crawford, the ‘grande dame’
of British design and consultant on store design for Donna Karan, it is
important in the future to design rooms in keeping with the human
beings who live in these rooms and not force on them a style only
because it is ‘in vogue’. She is convinced: rooms and their ambiance
are made by human beings; design can only help to understand better the
human beings who live there. From quite another point of view came Reto Gurtner, CEO of Weisse Arena in Flims/Laax. He spoke about continuing
to carry the fire, not the ashes. By fire he meant the hi-tech train
among other things, comparable to a ‘monorail’ on stilts, which is to
bring the guests of a resort in now-time to the railway stations of the
mountain railways.
Plea for Rituals and Dreams
The Swiss architect and designer, Pia Schmid, presented the itinerant
hotel: her ship that she was commissioned to design by an Egyptian ship
owner for river cruises along the Nile. Her work is poetry in colours
and forms and respects the rituals of the North Africans. Then she also
pleads for deliberate breaks in the design of interior rooms, following
the example of life, which also does not always come along in a
streamlined fashion. Anyone who knows Will Alsop, the top British
architect, and his work, was astonished not to encounter his great
projects in his talk, such as the master plan for the Fourth Grace in
Liverpool, the Battersea Station or the Hôtel du Département des
Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille but instead his dreams and utopias. He
did not present how he wants to give the faceless Barnsley industrial
site an identity in a bloodless master plan. No, he filmed his idea in
the person of a postman who sets forth to encounter a Barnsley that in
a wondrous way brings constructed and conceived architecture together
in his dream. What Will Alsop showed the public was a ‘symphony
phantastique’ and perhaps also an answer to the question, what the
hotel future should appear: Like a place where the soul can stroll
pleasurably between comfort and forms of appearance that astonish.
Frank Joss, initiator of Architecture Talks, wishes
for the Hotel Future that many investors, hoteliers, architects
and designers have understood the wise message of Will Alsop.
No Talks without Partners
The Architecture Talks 2005 have been supported by a generous gesture from the
following companies: Grohe, Interface, Jansen, Sarnafil, Swarovski,
Swiss International Air Lines as the official carrier, U.S.W.
Beschläge, Villeroy & Boch, Vitra and Zumtobel Staff as well as by
the Archithema Verlag, Die Weltwoche and the hotel + tourismus revue as
media partners.
Final report, 4 July 2005/Frank Joss
