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Room Service: Motel/Hotel Space as Service, Structure as Narrative, Self as Stranger

[07.2003]

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Room Service >

Graduate Seminar on
Motel/Hotel Space as Service, Structure as Narrative, Self as Stranger

Benjamin H. Bratton, Markus Bonauer, T.A., UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design
Summer 2003



I especially love what I most hate about hotels. This ambivalence ?not yet cynicism ? is, for me, a very productive position from which to conceive design. To misquote Andy Warhol, ?hotels have the best doorknobs, they have the best elevator buttons, they have the best ashtrays, they have the best miniature shampoo bottles, they have the best curious strangers, they have the best loud neighbors and the best check out times.?

In this spirit, Room Service, the seminar component of this integrated course, will focus on the cultural logics of the hotel/ motel as a complex social infrastructure. We will conceive innovative programmatic opportunities by defining the hotel architecture as a specialized kind of spatial service, one uniquely connected with the physical mobilites and psychological destabilizations of contemporary society.

It in this context, the dream and pathology of threshold mobility, that our design will intervene. As we know, the continuing capitalization of social space accelerates many forms of production, circulation and consumption, and ultimately transforms the city into its own image. As such the relentless movement and staged fixidity of persons, goods, capital, publics, and communication is a primary condition of social subjectivity.  We are interested precisely in the contradictions these mobilities signal; in the conditions that transpose circulation into inertia, movement into mediation, and publics into branded cargo.

Our research and design problematic is rooted in these connections and disconnections between a fixed site, consumption flow, biographical and bodily displacement and the conception of an architectural technology in their image.  Three core concepts will animate this investigation.

Space as Commodity Service
We have moved from the space of the commodity to the production and consumption of architectural space as itself a useful, exchangeable and semiotically-loaded commodity. We will focus design initiatives on the conception, definition and realization of student projects as machines for the successful staging of spatial services. Of course, sleeping and eating are core, but the range of performances available from a hotel is considerable. We will explore these variations as preconditions of program.

Structure as a Physical Narrative
Consumption is grammatical, habitation is temporal, and a service is dialogic. The staging of multiple services entails the positing and elaboration of a narrative told architecturally. This systematic narrative is intrinsic to a project?s brand and to how it employs all media (including concrete form) to enroll guests in the narrative. We will focus on the development of program and form as dramaturgy.

Self as Stranger
The hotel is a threshold space between public and private, and is where the baggage of one?s identity can be set aside if only temporarily. The hotel room accommodates strangers, and to stay in one is to stay a stranger, to rent estrangement from one?s routine habits and habitats. How can this be organized as a service, as a narrative, as program, as media, as space, as a critical technology of the self? We will focus on the composition of design intervention toward, through and against these estrangements.

The seminar will conducted in two phases, Checking-In, focusing on contemporary theories of mobile culture, the rise of the motel as a cultural and psychological typology, and the investment of branded services into hotel production and consumption; and Checking-Out, focusing on the signal of the hotel as a pathological space for critical theory and the temporal problematics associated with this, with recurring staging of the hotel as a fatal and terminal site, and with the trope of cannibalism in the consumption of hotel space (hotel guests).


Checking-In

Week One:
Figures of Displacement: Mobile Subjects, Spaces and Symptoms

The motel is a signal architecture of subjective mobility and attendant mobilizations of capital. The multiple accelerations of Modernity, the productions and configurations of spatialized time and temporalized space, made new demands on the built infrastructures of housing, publicity, commerce, dividuation and play. In this, travel became an institutional estrangement, a transformation of self into the stranger which would allow for and even require a service to reverse this, to make the self-stranger back into the self-home. But these transformations are never complete, and nor should they be. Estrangement can be a channel of tactical liberation, a pleasant schizophrenia, an allowance of another virtual self to have the run of the day (and night).

There are several literatures that address these conditions, and we will employ a few in the first week of the seminar.


Figure 1: Habitat Degree Zero: from Marta Rosler?s airport series

Marc Aug??s now familiar commentary on dislocation provides a kind of mapping strategy for the provisional, in-between, sometimes liminal zones in which the Modern Mobile serves time, neither here nor there, both deep inside and deep outside the narrative of spatial code. Diller + Scoficio?s Suitcase Studies can be read as a forensic meditation on the contemporary Will to Self, formulating and deforming itself through the itinerant structures of the vectoral trace. Martha Roesler?s photographs of airports freeze these trajectories, key-frames in a cinematic motion through symptom-space. Hans Ibelings? supermodernism thesis posits that the wave of globalization ushered in by jet air travel in the 1950?s and 60?s is to be read in the international boon in large, signal hotel projects sprinkled across the world?s node cities as literal and figural franchise spaces. Arjun Appadurai provides a critical geography of contemporary cultural globalizations that accounts for the reflexive modernizations of technology, ethnicity, media, finance, and ideology, and problematizes the momentum and conditions of architectural globalization in the context of a hypermobile network society. Mobility and intertia, are twin characteristics of this reflexivity, writes Paul Virilio. His early work as an architect, synchronous with Raoul Vaneigem and Attila Kot?nyi?s unitary urbansim, sought to deploy oblique planes and surfaces to remobilize in unexpected ways the body now passified by overprescribed urban habitat functions. But getting up and going has its down sides. Anthony Vidler begins a recent examination of modern spatial culture by establishing the primacy of various ?neuroses of space? (claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and various ?walking diseases?) Similarly, Krzystof Wodizcko?s homeless vehicle can be diagnosed as a primal form of motel architecture; a fully formed exoskeleton for the permanent nomad, one completely uninterested in simulating home or stimulating permanent identification.

Readings:
Marc Aug?,
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
Verso. 1995. Pp. 75-115.
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio,
?SuitCase Studies: The Production of a National Past?
Back to the Front: Tourisms of War,
Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Pp. 34-107.
Hans Ibelings,
Supermodernism, Architecture in the Age of Globalization,
NAI, 2002. Pp. 32-52.
Anthony Vidler, ?Terminal Transfer, Martha Rosler?s Passages?
Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture
MIT Press, 2000. Pp. 173-186.
Arjun Appadurai, ?Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy?
Modernity at Large
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pp.27-47.
Paul Virilio, ?Architecture Principe?
The Function of the Oblique
Architectural Association Press, 1996. Pp. 11-13.
Dick Hebdige, ?The Machine is Unheimlich: Wodizcko?s Homeless Vehicle Project?
Public Address
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1992. Pp. 55-75.

Films:
The Grand Hotel, 1933.
The VIP?s aka International Hotel, 1963.

Site Visit:
Drinks at the W Hotel, Westwood. Time TBD.


Potential Design Problematics:
How might ?identity? and ?individuation? be thought and strategized differently?

What effect does a society in transit have on the technologies through which self is managed? How does network mobility correspond to physical immobility, and how does it also enable cultures of transit?

What kinds of programs can be borrowed from public spaces and private spaces to produce the hybrid condition that is the hotel? What is at stake in foregrounding one of these in the development of the space?

What kind of subject does your space address, a particular, peculiar indivuated subject; a collecitive, generic global subject?

Is your space a place to accelerate or deaccelerate? Both? How?



Week Two:

I ♥ Roadside Heterotopia


Figure 2: High on the Horizon: Lucy and Desi pave the way for the ubiquitous auto-suburb. Production Still from Vincente Minelli?s The Long, Long Trailer (1954).

How can the temporary space of the motel be read as either (both) a utopic miniaturization of a idealized city, or (and) as a sidereal heterotopia, powerful for its specific, unaccountable utility? Foucault differentiates the logics of the utopia and the heterotopia. Utopias are inverted or perfected imaginary forms of current society. Sometimes utopia are without a place and sometimes they are at the very center of how place can ever emerges Heterotopias are real on another level. They are implied in the very founding of society as countersites that represent, contest, and invert all the other places. Heterotopia are sites where it is possible to embody contradictory categorical positions simultaneously, they promise a kind of im-possibility. This (non)site opens a cultural limit, Foucault says, one which functions foundationally, but also an intermediary zone where culture has always already begun to drift away from its codes, has begun to destabilize.

The motel makes use of both of these, and can be read and designed accordingly. The home away from home is both an idealized form of domestic space, now transposed into a public or quasi-public architecture, and, in its away-ness, it is also an alternative site of personal reflection, reckoning, transformation and various other psychodramas unavailable to ones? normal everyday life.



The American Sublime as  Death/Love Motel:
 Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh contemplate the ? from Jim Jarmusch?s Mystery Train (1989)

The proliferation of the motel in the 1940? and 50?s must be located not only on the brim of the intercontinental motorways which then crossed the United States, but also the automotive consumption of national space as a form of dutiful, windshield-mediated mass theater. The motel, as station of the journey, was not only a means to an end, an accommodation, it was a featured part of the fictive content of real space, a favored role in this road trip genre of automotive-cinema. The imaginary population of these were mobile nuclear families, and the utopic miniaturizaiton of the motel city served to renaturalize this as the element unit of the now regionally intermingling collective body. But simultaneously, the promise of a generic alternative city, one in which the rights of the stranger could be claimed in ways unthinkable ?outside,? ?back home,? also turned the motel against that renaturalization. The motel became a zone for illicit, improvisational, liminal, self-indulgent and/or transgressive purposes. This heterotopia was a place to fuck, a place to die, a place to tremble, a place to wake up disoriented in the company of a giant stucco dinosaur beside the fuel pumps.


 Readings:
Michel Foucault, ?Of Other Spaces,?
Michel de Certeau, ?Spatial Practices?
The Motel in America, John Jakle, Ed.
The American Motel, MK Witzel

Films:
The Long, Long Trailer, 1954
Lost Highway, 1997
Mystery Train, 1989
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998


Site Visit:
Gershwin West Hotel, 5533 Hollywood Blvd. Thai Town


Potential Design Problematics:
How can the hotel function as a heterotopia through its design as a utopia? That is, how can the ideal miniature city perform exceptionally well as a backdrop for the self-stranger?

What kinds of encounters need to be staged and accommodated for individuals, couples that know each other, newly formed groups, couples that just met, etc.? How must the logic of the heterotopia accommodate these?

What kinds of ?destination programs? can the hotel host to curate its daily and nightly traffic?

What kinds of programs can be devised for encounters between hotel residents and those there only for evening?

What kind of variable is time? For how long can the hotel remain a temporary site for an interloper before it becomes something else, perhaps some kind of collective home?




Week 3:
Plug, Point, Personalize: Information as Infrastructure, Network as D?cor


Before economies are markets they are first stories.

Post-industrial cultures have post-industrial dreams, and ?our? network sublime is erotic mobility, the branded whim; and in this, the hyperbrand hotel unfolds as both an environmental interface and a collective dream-toy. It is not only a space of the commodity, it is space as a commodity. For some, this hotel allows one to rent an amplified and exaggerated class position, an architectural designer suit you have to give back in the morning. For others, fewer in number, this hotel is a familiar and predictable base camp from which to stage one?s immediate purposes for the host city. For both, the hyperbrand hotel is a personal infrastructure for aspirant ambitions and an environmental medium for their audition. The content of this space as commodity are the real and imagined social, financial, and sexual networks that the hyperbrand hotel both promises and enables.



Figure 3: Palmer Eldrich, Preferred Guest: Modified Ad for a hotel chain. Rent branded space-time to conjure a better you and yours. Communicate with the world from this exaggerated subject position.


For a social culture that both brands mobility and ritualizes inertia, itinerant-space-as-service undergoes perpetual evaluation and updating. Certainly programmatic typologies allow for the legibility necessary for the popular participation in this clusterfuck of cultural capital. but the hyperbrand hotel is not only a formula, it is also an avant-garde of embryonic forms of network technologies and  plausible conditions for their reemployment later, outside the idealized bubble and back in practice of everyday life. The mythic, symbolic logics of the hyperbrand hotel as a place where one exceeds oneself form a strategic vocabulary with which to both reevaluate current programmatic conditions of architectonic performance, the staged network, and fictive capital, and to derive new forms from them and through them.


Readings:
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Michael Speaks, ?Individualization Without Identity? from City Branding
Ogilvy Branding Literature
New Hotels for Global Nomads
Geert Lovink, Mobile Minded
Benjamin H. Bratton, Soft Space


Films:
Andy Warhol, Chelsea Girls (1966)
Mike Figgis, Hotel (2003)

Site Visit:
The Standard, Downtown, Special Tour arranged.

Potential Design Problematics:
What kind of brand should your hotel have? What are the variables to consider in making it a secret space or a globally visible space? Which is more fabulous?

How can hotel program be rethought from the ground up through the affordances of information technology, both embedded within the site and accessible through global networks?

What is at stake in designing and developing the hotel as an interface system, as a communicating space that literally signifies its own programmatic possibilities?

To what extent should space-as-service be conceived as a very personalized exchange? What does it mean for the space to address the guest in the second person? What does this individuation do to the public quality of the space?

What kinds of retail programs and strategies should be considered? How should the hotel define itself according to urban and boutique logics of consumption?



   
Checking-Out

Week 4:
Flat Time, or Postmodernism as a Bad 80?s Hairdo

For Postmodern Theory 1984,  John Portman?s Bonaventure Hotel on Figueroa St. was the epicenter of Reagan Evil.  In his landmark essay, ?Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,? Fredric Jameson singles out the dizzyingly flat spaces of the Bonaventure as  symptomatic, not only of Postmodernist architecture, but of Postmodern culture and society in general. In America,  his sweeping anti-portrait of  our specular nation,  Jean Baudrillard cites/sites the Bonaventure as the very ?center of (a) world,? a  monolith presenting and representing the simulated political economy that had ?consumed the real.?

So designated with corrosive anxiety, the Bonaventure was for Jameson an urlocation for a generalized dislocation and unlocation that plagued the waning years of the Cold War. This hotel condensed vast forces of history, and characterized our  contemporary radically-distracted social condition. It became, in the discourse, an epicenter of  aesthetic geopolitics: a landmark to the banality of evil.



Figure 6: Cognitive Map Awry: Johnny Depp in Nick of Time, falling into the hypersynchronic atrium of Portman?s ahistorical Bonaventure lobby
.

Structure and superstructure, the architectonic  algorithm of Marxism, is the allegorical haunting Jameson?s tour of the hotel, one pedagogically opposed for us by the spatial logic of the site in question. He contrasts a relatively legible modern space, where exterior and interior interoperate in symbiotic conversion,  to the Bonaventure?s non-space, where interiority and exteriority are experientially and exponentially dislodged from one another. The hotel interior  is  a labyrinthine luxury moonbase, menacingly nowhere and anywhere; as the mirrorshade exterior exudes a defensive bad vibe to the supposedly public streets that surround it.

 Jameson finds portentous significance in the ease with which one can?t help but get lost, to lose one?s bearings in the undifferentiated ?here? of the hotel?s corridors.  The emblem disorientations the structure's unclear and deceptive inner passages of the inhabitant/citizen foreshadow the itinerant lodgings and dislodings of personal place that characterizes Postmodern space-time. There is, following Jameson?s turns and wrong turns, a material/ allegorical, relationship between the disorientation of  personal location inside the Bonaventure Hotel, and the inability of inhabitant/citizens of the World to properly orient themselves in the larger structures/ superstructures that determine social space.  This hotel is false consciousness. And against this global discomposure Jameson calls for a collective counter-cartography, a practice of ?cognitive mapping? that will re-give location to self, and a new clarity to the structural/superstructural architectonics that never really disappear despite contemporary sleights of hand and foot. 


But today, with the privilege of nearly two decades hindsight, Jameson?s and Baudrillard?s eschatological epistemologies of Junkspace sound a bit quaint, overstated, even organicist.  As we slide from cognitive mapping to submolecular existentialism, the architectures of trans-political, trans-market socialism are also elysian fields of recombinant displacement. Structure/ superstructure is bent, torn, refracted, scanned and transmitted elsewhere. For better or worse, life dislocated, life transversal, and life dromological are the pedestrian commonplaces (now frequent flyer commonplaces,) and are together the ambient backdrop against which the once menacingly disorienting, reflective, flat interior spaces of the Bonaventure appear now no scarier than the architectonic equivalent of a really bad 80?s hairdo. 



Readings:
Rem, Jameson and Baudrillard on the Bonaventure
Barthes on synchronic vs. diachronic time
John Urry, from Consuming Places
David Harvey on Spatio-Temporal Compression

Films:
Nick of Time

Site Visit:
Westin Bonaventure, Figueroa St, Downtown

Potential Design Problematics:
In what way should the hotel be thought of as a synchronic world unto itself, a singular bubble in which time stops?

What are the relations to larger economic forces that you wish to design with, against or outside of?

How do you want to accommodate the use of the hotel space as a political and financial theater?

What is the relationship between hotel interior and the urban flows in which it is situated?

What kind of sensorium is this? What does your hotel sound like? It is silent? Is it loud? Does it produce its own ambient din? How does this amplify choices made above?



Week 5:
 ??But You Can Never Leave?:  The End of the Line
.
The hotel is a place to die. The self-stranger one becomes upon checking-in is a agent of the itinerary, a vehicle of biographical arc. One comes from somewhere, is going somewhere; except when one is from nowhere, and is going nowhere. The hotel is a liminal site of transformation from one to other, where self is shed and death is acoomadated. Like cemetery plots, hotel rooms stack sleeping bodies high into the sky. Instead of names, these are differentiated, one after the other, by sequential room numbers. Choosing the anonymity of this final name is a kind of self-directed funeral rite.


Figure 5: Robert Kennedy dying by an assassin?s bullet at the Ambassador

In Wenders? Million Dollar Hotel, a wealthy scion looks for and finds the end of the world, and himself, among the broken psyches of the Hotel Rossalyn on Skid Row. There the exchange value of the oedipal family is fractured into an inoperative community of wayward, slow-motion suicides. His own suicide comes finally by literally hurling himself from the building into the void. Similarly, in Mike Figgis? Leaving Las Vegas, an alcoholic makes one last run at escape in the arms of a hooker and the hotels of the desert. To drink himself to death, he takes a first step out of the world and into the afterlife by first trading in for the dreamworld of  Vegas hotel space. The afterlife is literally channeled through the ghosts of guests current and past in Kubrick?s The Shining. The hotel is both the world  and the psyche of the possessed and dispossessed inn-keeper, himself consumed by the building?s appetite.

The hotel is also a stage for real ritual sacrifice. To die at the Marmont on the Sunset Strip is, for some, equivalent to being buried in P?re Lachaise. At the Ambassador, Robert Kennedy, along with what remained of the 60?s, was shot in the head. The image of his body lying bleeding on the ballroom floor only the most well known specter to haunt this peculiar space.

Norman M. Klein?s recent DVD for ZKM is an underground history of Los Angeles told through the ghosts of the Ambassador. Klein will give a guest lecture this week to discuss the parallel histories of Angelio hotels, the California death drive and the architectonics of memory and forgetting.

Readings
Norman M. Klein, Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986. Book and DVD
Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon
Remembering Marmont

Films:
    Wim Wenders, Million Dollar Hotel
    Mike Figgis, Leaving Las Vegas

Site Visits:
    Hotel Marmont
    Ambassador Hotel
    Hotel Rosslyn/ Million Dollar Hotel


Potential Design Problematics:
How much do you want to make explicit use of the biographical itinerary as a spatial theme?

Do you see your hotel as a node along a longer trajectory or as a final destination in is own right?

What kind of life (or death) can take place in the rooms? What is the relation between the rooms in producing the collective experience of this?

What kind of history should the hotel reveal or conceal about its site, and what has happened there in the past? Do you wish to enroll guests in this history or protect them from it?

How can guests mediate and remember their time spent in the hotel? Should this be in the form of photographs, mailing lists, mirrors everywhere, etc? How much should they actually ?see themselves? there,  while staying and after when gone?



Week 6:
Cannibal Hardware: A Place to Eat and Be Eaten


?We are thus dealing with a luxury and even a dangerous luxury, for there are cases in which mimicry causes the creature to go from bad to worse: geometer-moth caterpillars simulate shoots of shrubbery so well that gardeners cut them with their pruning shears. The case of the Phyllia is even sadder: they browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves...the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism.?

--Roger Caillois, ?Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia"

Jacques Derrida's ongoing seminar on ?friendship? became an investigation of "the rhetoric of cannibalism,? the ultimate attempt to become one with a friend. But the consumption of the  body of the Other only initiates the violent cuisine of space, and the consumption of the Other?s city, labor, trajectory, reflection, identity, voice (and flesh) is critical to the space that the hotel serves.

Freud inscribes cannibalism as a primary mode of identification. Cannibalism provides a way to capture the power and charm of the eaten, not only a possession, an internalization. The question of the boundary between the One and the Other is raised with eating and with the meal. Eating presupposes a clear distinction between the subject eating and the object being eaten, but the act of eating abolishes the distinction. The subject incorporates the object, the object stays in the subject and mixes with it, thereby obliterating the subject/object distinction.

Food and meals in art can basically be seen as metaphors for drawing and crossing boundaries. So can cannibalism. But cannibalism makes a difference. Taking part in a meal means eating of the same but not the same, and in particular - not eating one another. You do not eat the person you are eating with. Except, perhaps, in a hotel.

Perhaps this is because the immersive space of the hotel, as a total environment, the idealized miniature of the host city, is also a total and collective body.

The love hotel (and which one isn?t?) serves the body of the Other, and the dramatized transformation of self into that consumed; ?I is bushmeat?. Or as Peter Greenaway said in an interview, "once we've stuffed the whole world into our mouth, we end up eating ourselves.?

Readings
J.G. Ballard, High Rise
Hammer of the Gods, Led Zeppelin at the Hyatt House
Freud, from Mourning and Melancholy
Jean-Luc Nancy, from The Inoperative Community
Giorgio Agamben, ?The Camp as Nomos of the Modern? from Homo Sacer

Films
David Cronenberg, Shivers
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
Passolini, 120 Days of Sodom
Motel Hell
Douglas Gordon?s Psycho
Stephen Friers, Dirty Pretty Things
Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust
Peter Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Murnau?s Nosferatu
Oliver Hirschbiegel, Das Experiment

Site Visit
Hyatt House at King?s Road
The Sunset Motel, East Hollywood
Los Angeles County Jail

Potential Design Problematics:
Would your hotel make a suitable target for terrorist action? Why so? What would it ?mean? to attack your structure? Who might be most likely to do so and how?

For what purpose would your hotel be used for if the ?world ended??

What kinds of repressible and irrepressible tensions will exist in your hotel? How will they work for and against your design?

If your hotel became sealed off from the rest of the world, which parties would likely govern the space, and how would they do it?

Would your hotel eat someone? Who? How? Why?


--------
The seminar will combine the study of architectural precedent analysis with a post-critical cultural study of the hotel as a social typology. Each week students will read selected texts, watch films, visit local sites, and prepare research briefs for group discussion.

I will prepare a guiding brief each week which will be handed out one week in advance of the seminar during which we will discuss the material discussed therein.

Each seminar session will include a 40-50 minute talk by Bratton and a student-led discussion of readings. We will look at a variety of artifacts including political theory, urban theory, architectural critique and commentary. In addition, while it is expected that you have already read some of the early fabled texts on ?mobility? and ?globalization," we will look critically both at a several titles and films.

Each student will prepare a one page brief each week on the assigned readings. You are welcome to use the weekly brief to workshop a provocative polemic or to present sober data you?ve mined. You are encouraged to link your seminar research with your studio project. We are of the opinion that work invested in one will bear fruit in the other.

A final project/paper, (abstract due by midterm) completes the requirements of the seminar. During selected weeks, there will be an additional student presentation on a prescribed topic.

Tags: architecture, ucla, mobility

Published: 07.14.2010

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