Have you read "The Hotel New Hampshire" by John Irving? Some nice ruminations on what people expect from a hotel experience in comparision to their everyday experience.

It's fiction.

Good luck with your dissertation, it sounds fun (if any dissertation can be "fun").

I dont really think so-

I agree hotels can ceratinly be places of fantasy in all sorts of senses- not just the sort of las vegas sense. There is Jean Nouvels hotel in lucerne that has images from film projected on to the ceiling of each room, creating a sort of parallel fantasy to the room- without theming the room. The there is a hotel in berlin where all the rooms are bizarrely themed, and places of real fantasy( i cant remeber the name) but it also has every practicical need for a hotel- a bed ,bathroom etc. So the experience hotel is also practical, with a wide variety of the experience and its scope. The no frills hotels you are talking about , are actually difficult to call no frills. Lots of shiny grp, a flatscreen tv, and a real design sense. I think they are just more ispired my economy of space fashioned by good design rather than no frills. There are loads of books to look at, and i think you need to be very specific in your argument.

Try- cheap hotels, tachen and the exhibition catalogue - new hotels for global nomads from the cooper hewitt.

I like the idea of a separation between fact and fiction in hotels, but i think that can exist in every hotel- form the anticipatory idea of going on holiday and staying in a hotel, to the many levels of inhabitiation that challenge the idea of fact within hotels.

the motel, for example, is very much a 'factual' place in your sense of no-frilling. but, it is almost an archetype all of its own, a place where the promiscuous, the transitory, the rejected/dejected are momentarily housed. and in that sense, it is also your 'fictional' ...or rather 'mythical'. perhaps the real division here is not between fact and fiction, but between the different myths of different classes and groups of people.

cellardoor, at the risk of drawing your attention and thus your usually sharp commentary toward myself, that's actually a very helpful post and (I think) an interesting reading of motels - a home for the displaced that is fictional in that it's temporary and is also a commodity. And is reflected in mythical romantic notions of escape typified by movies like Kalifornia and a zillion others I can't recall right now...

Though I guess mondays you aren't interested in "motels" - are there motels in London? The only urban motels I know are in Detroit and are mostly used by prostitutes.

You could also argue in the reverse ... those hotels that provide an experiential are actually more fact-based in that they employ legions of IDEO-esque "experience" architects and interaction designers, all for the purpose of creating a space that does mirror social and economic dynamics. On the other hand, a "no-frills" hotel is more of a fiction-sensitive space in that it invites some type of proactive imagination on behalf of the guest. This is perhaps too simpllistic, but in one sense, an experiential hotel has everything figured out for you, whereas with the no-frills hotel, you figure everything out for yourself. This, of course, varies from user to user, so it may not be instructive.

As for fictional depictions of hotels, Nick Bantock's Paris Out of Hand is a psychogeographic drift through a fictional Paris, replete with all types of imaginary hotels. Saul Bellow's Seize The Day takes place inside a Depression-era hotel. Herman Melville's The Confidence Man takes place on a riverboat, which is a type of floating hotel. Julio Cortazar's The Winners also takes place inside a cruise ship. My favorte hotel movie is Dirty Pretty Things.

Not sure if this helps, but this is an interesting topic.

great thread / dissertation topic...


where would the capsule hotels of Japan fit? very utilitarian and therefore fact based (according to the OP)

or

so basic that they allow for fiction-sensitivity (smoketyMc ss)???

if you want a good read that pushes the super fantastic view of the hotel, check out "the grand hotels of joseph cornell" by robert coover.

it's more fictional than architectural, but still interesting and imaginative.

Robert Coover is fantastic.

Pinnocchio in Venice is another great book of his. His writing is layered and spatial (if that's possible).

good resort architecture is like any good architecture. capture the place - make sense of it's use and ways of making the building - and place it in the memory of those who stay. hopefully you have the advantage of a great destination to not fuck up.

i am personally very interested in your experience and voyage. please keep us posted about what you find.

...and good luck to you

i lived in a motel for four months i sort of liked it. except for the nosebleeds.

Another motel movie - Identity. With the adorable John Cusack.

Thanks for your ideas! Is very helpful :)

I will keep you posted on my findings and thoughts...

Out of interest... Why do you think the Chelsea Hotel in NY has such appeal.... is it the eclectic and eccentric people/stories that make it mystical...?

I like Smokety's point...

If design tries too hard...is that a "turn-off"?....But then, does spending time in a "no frills" hotel make you reel with excitement and let you live fiction in your mind??

From my own experience -if I feel like escaping (real) uni life ...my first trip is to the hotel lobby for some drinks...

The hypothesis sounds very interesting, but the fiction/ factual distinction seems to be unclear. From comments here it seems that what is meant by fiction is escapism, fantasy, radical alterity, (like the Bonadventure) and what is meant by factual is something functional, unadorned and ancillary. But as a couple of people have said, both are equally constructed, so if the respective qualities/levles of artifice are what you are comparing, the "control" factor here would actually be the home or the homely.

For example AP raised capsule hotels as an example of factual (in sense of utilitarian) places. An obverse, love hotels or soapland hotels are sites of fantasy for their guests really because they are constructed entirely unlike a typical Japanese home.


In Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day you get a two-in-one in its portrayal of the fantastical upstairs and the functional downstairs of a hotel. I recently discovered that this film was actually supposed to be part of a "hotel" series including movies by Atom Egoyan and Olivier Assayas, but only Denis came through. You do see bits of the hotel theme in Irma Vep (later elaborated in Demonlover), but Atom fell out of the project completely. Maybe might be interesting to look at.