Happier Trails in 2013

Panorama of Barcelona from an abandoned road

Garden and Gaffe: A Hotel by Jean Nouvel

“The city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small city”
-Leon Battista Alberti

If there is one type of "house" that comes closest to Alberti’s “small city”, then surely it is the hotel. Like a city, a hotel is comprised of both private “residential” space (in this case temporary residences) and relatively public functions; the private realm making up the representative bulk and consisting of largely repetitive units while the more public lobby, conference spaces, restaurant, and so on are monumental, singular spaces of representation. The ultimate mixed-use building type, a hotel is a place where guests stay for a variety of reasons, be it a travelling sales rep hoping to strike a business deal, illicit lovers having an affair, criminals evading the police, academics at a conference, or spies on an intelligence-gathering mission. Anything can and everything has happened in hotels: Watergate, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-ins for Peace, Dominique Strauss Kahn.

It is no surprise, then, that the hotel has become in recent times one of the most architecturally reinvigorated types of buildings. The drab, beige hotel of the nineteen seventies and eighties, where sameness, familiarity and the offer of a cozy “home away from home” was the ideal, is seemingly a thing of the past. Hotels have instead become places where people seek a memorable experience that is precisely different from the familiarity and routine humdrum of home. As an “experience” space available to a majority of people, the hotel can also be seen as a democratization of the pleasure palaces of the aristocracy of previous centuries.

The Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel by Jean Novel and Ribas & Ribas is, like many palaces, characterized principally by a garden, that most sensuous space of pleasure and temptation since biblical times. This garden, however, climbs up a 26 story high atrium space that is completely open to the exterior on one of the sides of the tower, which forms a “U” shaped floor plan in which the rooms are accessed by garden-facing galleries that are open during three seasons of the year, and that are separated from the garden in winter by means of transparent roll-down barriers.

A single staircase climbs up the atrium along a different trajectory at each level change, connecting galleries as well as bridges, platforms, and a over a hundred planter boxes containing ten different varieties of palm trees and other plant species. It is a delirious, seemingly endless space that would make Giovanni Battista Piranesi proud, and which redefines the late-modern hotel atrium made famous by architect-developer John Portman.

It is the exterior openness of this atrium that sets it apart from any of  John Portman’s, however. In this atrium, there is no wall-to-wall carpeting, no chrome, and no air conditioning. Instead, there is a gentle breeze and the sounds and framed view of a city beyond. The leaves of the palm trees move in the breeze, and the hotel rooms open directly onto an exterior garden and not into a long, dim, anonymous corridor, making it tempting for guests to leave the door open when in their rooms.

Unfortunately, however, the theme of “palm tree” has been taken by its architect just a little too far. The palm tree-shaped windows of most of the rooms are gimmicky and goofy. A gaffe. Those windows are precisely why it’s a good thing the doors of the hotel rooms open directly onto the memorable garden--and city--outside.

Strange Bedfellows

Left: Construction of Instant City, Ibiza, in 1971 (photo www.domusweb.it)
Right: Hotel Algarrobico, Carboneras, Almería, 2010.

The image at left shows the construction of the "Instant City" during the congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) of 1971, which was held at the Hotels Cartago and Galeón in Ibiza (visible in the background). The Instant City is currently the subject of a celebratory exhibition at the Macba (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art) titled "La utopía es posible."

The image at right shows the infamous Hotel Algarrobico, construction of which began in the early 2000s within the boundary of the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Nature Park--a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1997. Although it has repeatedly been ordered to be demolished by the courts, this never completed behemoth is still standing to date. As part of a 2007 Greenpeace "action" to raise awareness, the words "hotel ilegal" were painted in large four story high letters on its sea-facing elevation. 

The two hotels in these images, whose architecture is not entirely dissimilar, are separated by a distance of only four hundred kilometers and a timespan of only a few decades, yet one is celebrated as the site of an optimistic event that marked a milestone in the cultural modernization of Spain, while another has become the very symbol of political corruption and reckless development in this country. Utopia and dystopia: strange bedfellows indeed.