The hyper-real images of the city and contemporary hotel design

Abstract

Hotels can be viewed as assemblies of complicated relationships. As buildings, they have a strong articulated sense of exterior and interior space, but as dwellings, they serve the circulatory city, tourists and visitors and often function as temporary domestic or business spaces. As such, they are organisations serving both consumption and service functions. To keep up with consumers’ demands, hotels must appeal to users’ tastes and sense of status by offering avant-garde spaces and undertaking frequent refreshments. These refurbishments reflect contemporary trends in consumer marketing, distinction and branding. Chain hotels often bear no relationship to their surroundings. Instead, they impose a set of cultural assumptions on their hotel designs in all countries, offering similar experiences globally. Unsurprisingly, consumers are seeking alternatives to more traditional accommodations through design, uniqueness, experience and personal service. In response, chain hotels are now beginning to rebrand themselves by moving away from ‘one size fits all’ models. Critics of chain hotels fear that the image of the hotel has become the new reality and push designers to go beyond creating superficial worlds of styles, design trends and conceptual strategies and instead to demand spaces that offer authentic and ‘real’ experiences. This paper examines the contemporary ethical and social questions arising from the relationship between hyperreality and spectacle in contemporary hotel design, discussing theories by Jean Baudrillard on hyperreality, Guy Debord on the notion of spectacle and Fredric Jameson and his critique of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. Each theorist draws attention to the disconnect between hotel spaces and the everyday practices and meanings of people and highlights how they deal, instead, in systems of images and signs that have a life of their own. Often, they constitute ‘the real’ in new forms of inequalities. This disconnection is further highlighted and discussed using a case study undertaken by final-year interior design students in 2019.