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HOTEL
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At the most basic level, a hotel provides temporary shelter for
travelers, function that the 20th-century hotel shares with its
predecessors extending back to the ancient inn. As modern
building type, the hotel integrates a complex variety of uses,
including lodging. food service, and retail, into
specialized
building program. After the office building, the hotel is the most
important building type to embrace the skyscraper form, thus
addressing the architectural challenge of efficiently arranging co-
dependent yet distinct public, private, and service spaces. Hotels
generally have major public spaces on the lower- and uppermost
floors, largely identical floors of guest rooms between, and re-
lated service areas carefully woven throughout the plan. This
basic program appeared in the 19th century and was associared
with large railway hotels located in cities around the world. How-
ever, the scale and complexity of the 20ch-century hotel make
it a distinctive building type and an important focal point in
the urban landscape. By virtue of its location, the resort hotel
caters to tourists and merits its own analysis.
The hotel is a building type intimately linked to the socioeco-
nomic changes of the 20ch century. The rise of a consumer
culture, especially in the United States, spurs urban growth and
directly benefits service-sector businesses such as the hotel indus-
try. Increased tourism, widely accessible commercial travel, and
annual conventions provide an expanded dientele for the com-
mercial hotel. Since the early decades of the 20th century, com-
petition to attract conventions has especially shaped the planning
of new hotels. Major exhibit halls, meeting rooms, and audito-
riums require a large percentage of space on the public floors of
the hotel to be devoted to convention-relared facilities.
These trends first peaked in the 1920s, making that decade
the heyday of the development of the hotel as a 20th-century
building type. New hotels, such as the Roosevelt (1924, George
B. Post and Sons) in New York, Hotel Stater (1927, George
B. Post and Sons) in Boston, and the Los Angeles Biltmore
(1923, Schultze and Weaver), are just few of the massive hotels
from that period with around 1,000 guest rooms. The Stevens
Hotel (Holabird and Roche), the largest hotel in the world.
opened on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago in 1927. With
3,000 guest rooms, 3,000 baths, and huge array of public
spaces, dining rooms, and convention facilities, the Stevens epit-
omizes the early 20th-century architectural development of the
hotel.
The balance between the commercial purpose of the hotel
and the need to create a domestic atmosphere often led hotels
to embrace historically inspired architectural styles and interior
design. Multitowered, Beaux-Arts- influenced skyscraper forms
with eclectic decorative programs were common during the early
20th century, After World War I, hotels followed the shift to
modernism in commercial architecture.
The resulting aesthetic
change to ahistoric minimalism was dramatic, but hotels largely
retained the same basic functional arrangement and preference
for mainstream architectural styles.
Hotels often feature a combination of conservative architec-
tural design and innovative systems and technology. Among the
most significant hotels in the 19th century, Adler and Sullivan's
Auditorium Building (1889) in Chicago combined theater.
modern hotel, and office space. Using the latest in modern con-
veniences has been vital to a hotel's success since the 19th cen-
tury, and 20th-century hotels quickly incorporated any impor-
tant new technology. The most significant improvements were
plumbing and air conditioning and their subsequent influence
on the form and use of the hotel. Although indoor plumbing
was available in 19th-century hotels, private baths were relatively
rare. The basic standard for horels changed rapidly in the carly
20th century, and by the 1920s nearly all new hotels provided
a private bathroom for each guest room. Arranging and servicing
the bathrooms is problem specific to the 20th-century hotel.
The architectural firm of George B. Post and Sons developed
an efficient layout to provide private bathrooms in an affordable
commercial hotel with its designs for the important carly chain
Hotels Stater, Bathrooms arranged in pairs along the interior
wall create mirror-image room plans that allow two bathrooms
to share one plumbing shaft. Standardized hotel architecture
did not emerge until the postwar period, but this plan was an
important first step.
Ventilation creates another challenge for the 20ch-century
hotel. The multiple towers of the large pre-World War I hotel
provide exterior light and air to all the guest rooms. Mechanical
air conditioning was first introduced in the public rooms of
some major urban hotels in the 1920s. Starting in the 1950s.
new hotels provided air-conditioned guest rooms, eliminating
dependence on exterior ventilation. The new possibilities that
air conditioning brings to the hotel form are perhaps best utilized
by the Hyatt Regency Hotels of John Portman and Associates.
Portman's Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1967), Hyare Regency
'Hare (1971), and Hyatt Regency San Francisco (1973) feature
dramatic new form focused inward on the atrium lobby. Pott-
man and his imitators use a modernist vocabulary to create the
grand public space of the atrium, but the functional program
of the hotel remains essentially the same.
External forces, such as urban development and transporta-
ion patterns, also help reconfigure the fundamental relationship
between hotel and location. The shift in the United States from
railroad to automobile travel transforms the shape, scale, and
location of hotels. The downtown skyscraper hotel usually lacks
parking facilities, and motels emerge along highways to serve
the interstate traveler. In the post -World War I1 period, hotel
development moves beyond downtown, especially with con-
struction around outlying airports. However, the form and pro-
gram of the hotel building type remain essentially urban.
The American hotel defines the building type throughout the
20th century, especially in the postwar period with the growing
international dominance of a few large hotel chains. The stan-
dardized Hilton. Sheraton, or Marriott hotel, more than any
other building, symbolizes American commercial culture
throughout the world. Standardized commercial hotels sell
self-contained vision of urban order and prosperity closely tied
to the emergence of a deindustrialized global cconomy.
Throughout the 20th century, hotels reflect the impact of eco-
nomic change in the urban landscape and the social demands
that shape a complex commercial building type.
LISA PRUELLER DAVIDSON
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
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GALLERY |
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ARCHITECTS |
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BOFILL, RICARDO
BOTTA, MARIO
TANGE, KENZO |
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BUILDINGS |
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1922, Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, JAPAN, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT |
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1951, HOTEL TIJUCO, DIAMANTINA, BRAZIL, OSCAR NIEMEYER |
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1957, BRASÍLIA PALACE HOTEL, BRASILIA, BRAZIL, 2 |
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1961, Atami Garden Hotel, Kanagawa, JAPAN, KENZO TANGE |
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1973–1980, Porto Carras, Chalkidiki, Greece, WALTER GROPIUS |
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1982, Akasaka Prince Hotel, Tokyo, JAPAN, KENZO TANGE |
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1993, APA HOTEL & RESORT TOKYO BAY Central Tower, Chiba, JAPAN, KENZO TANGE |
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1993, Costes K Hotel, Paris, France, RICARDO BOFILL |
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1994, Shinjuku Park Tower (Park Hyatt Tokyo), Tokyo, JAPAN, KENZO TANGE |
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1995, Takamiya Hotel Rurikura Resort ( Former Zao Recreation Center for Department of Defense Mutual Aid Association), Yamagata, JAPAN, KENZO TANGE |
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2003-2006, Tschuggen Bergoase, Arosa, SWITZERLAND, MARIO BOTTA |
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2004-2012, Square and spa, Rigi Kaltbad, Switzerland, MARIO BOTTA |
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2006-2012, Hotel Twelve, Shanghai, China, MARIO BOTTA |
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2008, The Dolder Grand, Zürich, Switzerland, NORMAN FOSTER |
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2009, W Hotel Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, RICARDO BOFILL |
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2009, Capella Resort, Sentosa, Singapore, NORMAN FOSTER |
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INTERNAL LINKS
HOLABIRD, WILLIAM;
FURTHER READING
A comprehensive archisectural history of the hotel has yet to be written,
and many of the available secondary sources are general or anecdotal
in nature. Hotel trade journals such as Hotel Monthly and Honed World
are useful for tracing this building type's development.
Bruegmann, Robert, "Palaces of Democracy: The Busines Hotel,"
in The Architects and the City: Holabird and Roche of Chiorge,
1880-1918. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
Denby, Elaine, Grand Hotte: Reality and Ilasion: An Architectural
and Social History. London: Reaktion Books, 1998
Done, Catherine. Alexis Gregory, and Marc Walter, Palaces et
grands heter d'Amerique da Nord, Paris: Flammarion, 1989; as
Grand American Horek, New York: Vendome Press, and London:
Thames and Hudson, 1989; as Grand Hotels of North America,
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1989
Jakle, John A., Keich A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers, The Motel
in America, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996
Lapidus, Morris, and Alan Lapidus, "Commercial Hotels," in
Time-Saver Standards for siding Types, edited by Joseph De
Chiara and John Hancock Callender, New York: McGraw-Hill
1973; 3rd edition, 1990
Pevsnct, Nikolaus, A Histury of Building Tapes, Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, and London: Thames and
Hudson, 1976
R
aitz, Karl B., and fol Paul Jones, Ill, "The City Hotel as
Landscape Artifact and Community Symbol," Journal of Cultural
Geography (1988)
Root, John Wellborn, "Hocels and Apartment Hotels," in Forms and
Functions of Twentieth-Century Archisecture, vol. 3; Building
Types: Buildings fur Residence, for Popular Gatherings for
Education, and for Government, edited by Talbot Hamlin, New
York: Columbia University Pres, 1952
Williamson, Jefferson, The American Hotel: An Anvodotal Hissory,
New York and London: Knopf, 1930, reprint, as The American
Hotel, New York: Arno Press, 1975 |
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