Studio 2.5 - Hotel

Hotel (or, home away from home)

A one-room hotel in five extreme climates. A 10-50 bedroom hotel in Heathrow In this “particular and unprecedented” year where mobility has ground to a halt, we will precisely look at the history and roles of tourism through the embodiment of the hotel.

Semester 1. A one-room hotel in five extreme climates

During the first semester we will work with the main unit of a hotel, the room, and we will conduct a radical investigation by locating them in notional, extreme climates, where typology and building fabric inseparably and critically coalesce into one object. The lack of conventional repetition will give us the groundwork for the second semester project.

Semester 2. A 10-50 bedroom hotel in Heathrow

For the second project, we will work around Heathrow airport, in locations both particular and radically generic, and we will develop proposals for medium-sized terminal hotels of between ten and 50 rooms. The brief will be additionally informed by a significant public function proposed by each student, attempting a strong connection with the territorial/global, but also suburban ecology of the airport. Here we are interested in the “whole” and in how we can respond to the post-Covid19 future as a new chapter in the long and shifting history of tourism and human displacement, but also regarding the hotel as a place for (short-term) dwelling.

A year-long research aspect of the Studio will critically look at the relationship between tourism and hotels across history, from the Greeks, Romans, Middle ages, Renaissance, Grand Tour/Industrial revolution, the advent of global mobility, and envisage directions for our unchartered future(s).