Simplistic beauty has been the goal from the start. Beauty that comes from a modest operation and becomes delightfully absurd. The field of steel columns with operable planter boxes defines a new datum with which the topography plays. Entering the site, the avenues cut into the field to allow movement and gathering spaces. As you move up the hill, you slowly rise out of the forest and see a field of living and dying plants that stretch out over the site and crawl up the hotel.

The vegetal tone of the project channels through millennia of leisure theory: hanging gardens of Babylon, Eden, Summer of ’68 and the Situationists, O.M.A.’s La Villette, and Constant’s New Babylon. Guiding inspiration from each of these projects and writings, Hotel Luden is a place designed for true leisure – liberation. The design problem of creating place that reiterates spontaneity requires much more than the shallow understanding of how we interact.

“The liberation of behavior requires a social space that is labyrinthine, but at the same time continually subject to modification.” – Libero Andreotti