Hotel Life

The Story of a Place Where Anything Can Happen

Caroline Field Levander, Matthew Pratt Guterl

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469621135
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.

Space

1: Public

Grand Hotel, a 1932 film about the daily excitements of the world’s most exquisite and cosmopolitan home-away-from-home, begins with an overhead shot of a telephone switchboard. Because of the overlapping babble, it is impossible to hear anything in particular, but it is clear that robust human interactions, both near and from afar, are flourishing. The camera turns to a sequence of phone banks, in which several of the principal characters are talking to friends and family far away, questing for information about loved ones, or confessing their heartfelt desires. “All the best people are here,” confides one elderly man, determined to spend his final, dying days in posh luxury. And he seems to be right, for within the Grand Hotel there are barons and businessmen, showgirls and secretaries. While Johann Strauss’s “Beautiful Blue Danube” plays in the background, we see the romantic bustle of the lobby, first from the doors, then, from far above, a swirling, orchestrated dance set against a checkerboard mosaic floor, and finally from the proletarian perspective of the central concierge table, where the bellhops cheer each other on and wait for their turn to manage the ebb and flow of guests and visitors. Here, in a single scene, the hotel looks like a series of intimate, overlapping worlds, brought together in one great public space, a parallel to the deck of a cruise ship or the waiting room of a train station.

Is this a public space, full of chance encounters and unexpected crossovers? Or is it a series of discrete domesticities? Grand Hotel—and the hotel more generally, as this chapter argues—is both, and this medley of seemingly opposed spaces and spheres is a key feature of the hotel’s enduring allure in modern culture. The constant balancing between exposure and concealment—between public and private spheres—is the daily work of modern life in an urban setting. Indeed, how a society divides its space into public and private spheres and how this division controls individuals’ movement from one place to another have become, in Lefebvre’s wake, subjects of critical attention in the fields of architectural theory, political philosophy, and urban studies. If the public-private distinction has been a key organizing principle shaping the physical spaces of cities and the social lives of citizens, it is nonetheless the case that relations between public and private spheres have changed over the course of history, with the rise of urban society. The intimate space of the home has evolved to embrace new lifestyles and greater integration of intimate arrangements into the logic of the city’s public spaces as loci of sociability and intermingling.

A still of the kaleidoscopic lobby of the Grand Hotel, viewed from above, from the 1932 film of the same name, directed by Edmund Goulding. (From the authors’ collection)

Yet, if the division of space and society into public and private spheres regulates individuals’ behavior and orientation in the world, transitions between public and private, as Christopher Alexander has observed in his landmark A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, are never seamless, simple, or linear.¹ Urban space is characterized by stuttered and staggered gradations between public and private spheres, with walkways, arcades, and various other architectural features creating gradients of intimacy within public spaces. People need these gradients of setting, Alexander contends, to mark differing degrees of intimacy in the fluid cacophony of urban space—to differentiate the most intimate spaces of our built environment (spaces like the bathroom and bedroom) from the more public spaces of the market or municipal building. Not surprisingly, intimacy gradients are built into the architectural logic of the hotel with particular force and meaning, given the hotel’s role, on the one hand, as provider of shelter and intimate sleeping space and, on the other hand, as provider of company—of stories, adventures, and encounters that remind the traveler who stays the night in a strange place that he or she is still a member of the human community and therefore in need of company.

In this iteration, the hotel is a hybrid space somewhere between the private arena of the home and the public place of the market, but constantly referencing and offering blended iterations of both spheres to its occupants. Thus the hotel functions much like a highly transient neighborhood with shifting public and private spaces that harbor, for the course of an evening, a self-selecting group of people who choose to inhabit a cohesive physical location. Despite its notable absence from urban studies and critical analyses of private and public spheres, the hotel highlights the fact that public and private spaces exist on an ever-shifting continuum in the modern city, even as it contains in concentrated form the full range of porous possibility that the two spheres provide modern urban space. Public spaces within the hotel, such as the restaurant, bar, and reception area, serve a variety of purposes for those who inhabit them, as do the hotel’s most private spaces—spaces like bedroom and bathroom. Indeed, it is precisely through sustained attention to the tangible materiality of architectural space created by bricks and mortar—as opposed to conceptually rich but physically immaterial linguistic or philosophical spaces—that, as Elizabeth Grosz observes, we can come fully into our own as modern subjects.² This promise of de-fragmentation, of being a “whole person,” holds infinite allure for those who walk through the hotel lobby’s front door.

Servility

With its large, malleable public spaces of ballrooms, lobbies, and conference rooms, the hotel is a highly mutable space of modernity; it both offers and ultimately is the “junkspace” that architect-theorist Rem Koolhaas, in a 2002 essay in Obsolescence, has identified as an inevitable byproduct of modernity, replete with its accelerating challenges to the political stability of the human subject. Constantly being unmade and remade, the hotel-as-junkspace produces in those walking through its quasi-public/private, multipurpose, and repurpose-driven areas a kind of subjective vertigo much like that captured by the opening scene of Grand Hotel—making us uncertain of where we are, obscuring where we want to go, and undoing where we thought we were. Hotel-as-junkspace asks those who enter its domain, in short, the most fundamentally political of all questions: Who do we think we are and who do we want to be. Precisely for this reason, among others, Fredric Jameson, in his 1991 polemic, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, turned to the hotel and, more particularly, to the Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure as a prime example of the kind of “total space” and “complete world” promised by what he terms “hyperspace”—those urban spaces springing up in the interstices of stabilized domains that facilitate new collective practices and new modes of moving and congregating.³

The following pages focus on these more overtly public spaces and functions of the hotel and the opportunities they afford occupants to envision and reenvision themselves, while the next chapter turns its attention explicitly to the hotel’s more private domains and the very personal activities they enable. Read together, these opening chapters move the reader through the hotel’s intimacy gradients in order to lend shape and texture to the permeable space that is the hotel—to show the fluidity and interplay of public and private worlds ongoing within its walls. This chapter moves through the hotel lobby to the less readily visible public domains of service and business operations in order to consider how these worlds blend in powerfully generative ways for a wide range of occupants, some of whom stay for a night and some of whom end up staying for decades. Within the highly mutable architectural space provided by the hotel, public and private spheres are in constant dialogue—the hotel’s public spaces serving to create distinction in an impersonal and transient world and its private spaces becoming staging grounds for the most intimate dimensions of the modern self. Through engagement with all of these varied spaces, inhabitants test out different and new iterations of self—iterations that can simultaneously offer powerful new ways of being in the world and pungent reminders of the constant threats that modernity poses to individuals.

Thus, when Grand Hotel’s Dr. Otternschlag sits at the bar and asks himself “What do you do in the Grand Hotel?—in a hotel in which “a hundred doors lead to one hall” and “no one knows anything about the person next to them”—his answer that you “eat, sleep, loaf around, flirt around, dance a little,” makes implicit sense. In such a world public and private spheres blend, offering an alluring array of fantasies about self-making and distraction. This fantasy world, which Henry James and more recently Cornel West term “hotel civilization,” is a world in which comfort, convenience, and contentment wipe out the harsher realities of life, be they pain, misery, or racism.⁴ Thus the film’s most famous line—Greta Garbo’s “I want to be alone”—signals the seamless power and ubiquity of the sanctified privacy and protections the hotel offers those cloistered within its walls.

Indeed, the film industry’s quick uptake of this concept—its use of the phrase “Grand Hotel theme” to refer to any movie that tracks the activities of people in large and busy places who may not know each other but whose lives overlap signals the film’s (and, more fundamentally, the hotel’s) foundational importance to how contemporary culture understands and represents alternative public and private worlds. By virtue of their industry designation, “Grand hotel” movies—no matter their setting—overlay the hotel’s unique ability to summon into being a rich array of gradations between public and private worlds and to architect these gradients of intimacy into the lived experience of hotel guests. Grand Hotel’s 2007 selection for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant indicates how powerful and enduring its vision of the hotel as the place where these public and private lives are at once carefully protected and yet intermingled has been over the past eighty years.⁵ The public and private environments that the hotel offers help guests and managers curate visitors’ experiences, keeping them apart and bringing them together, and they are engineered to do both without calling attention to either task.

The hotel life envisioned in Grand Hotel and reproduced ad infinitum for a modern public is about producing a kind of wish fulfillment through which the building and all of its smaller intimacies change, at a moment’s notice, to suit the needs of the guest. The institution’s infinite capacity to serve as a rented replacement space for anything is a reflection of the demise of those spatial possibilities beyond the generic bricks and mortar of the local airport Courtyard by Marriott or outside of the sculpted European facade of the Plaza. Partly because of its genuine revolutionary potential—on powerful display, for example, in the so-called Arab spring of 2011—true public space now seems heavily constrained or controlled, and surrogate spaces must be found and, by and large, contracted. Domestic private space is also imagined to be under assault, but a hotel provides hundreds of perfectly sealed-off private preserves, and its attentive staff guarantees (or professes to guarantee) discretion and privacy. So these alternative privates and publics, built within the hotel on purpose and with intimacy gradients that carefully curate movement between spheres, emerge as a substitute for what we imagine to be the unsatisfactory domesticities of the home front and the dwindling public spaces of the traditional cityscape. The hotel’s ability to offer guests and workers an alternative private or public arena (or both, as needed) is thus a perfect symptom of this neoliberal epoch, with its seemingly innocuous transfer of responsibility from agencies as different as the state or the family to the corporation.

The hotel that we are describing evolved over time to its present architectural and functional role and only gradually came to be such a powerful provider of the seductive blend of public and private spheres that it is today. We can begin to understand the hotel’s gradual evolution to its present social form by considering Italian architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli’s famous mid-eighteenth-century map of Rome. The meticulously executed twelve engraved copper plates represented in microscopic detail the approximately eight square miles of this ultimately modern city, and the Nolli map continues today to be one of the best resources for understanding Rome, used by architects, surveyors, and demographers. Nolli used scientific surveying, careful base drawings, and precise architectural scale achieved through magnetic and astronomical compass use to create a breathtakingly complete and minute picture of the Roman city. But the true innovation of the Nolli map lies in the architect’s creation of a way to measure urban density by designating public space in white and buildings in black, and so the Nolli map continues to be widely accepted in urban design as a way to show public space in urban settings.

Within the context of the Nolli map, hotels over time became increasingly represented by white areas within the dark outlines of the private building, their lobbies in particular offering literal light spots of public encounter and interchange as the city became increasingly dense. La Pianta Grande di Roma (“the great plan of Rome”) may be one of the most revealing and artistically designed urban plans of all time, but its attention to the flexible and evolving iterations of blended public and private space, particularly within the context of such venues as public houses and hotels, is, for our purposes, its most powerful achievement. If the Nolli map captured the eighteenth-century hotel’s evolving ability to offer those who flocked to it alternatives and innovations to public and private space, contemporary hotels stand as the “home away from home,” the public square, the marketplace, the crossroads, and the old neighborhood, now owned and operated by Marriott.

When we consider Grand Hotel’s kaleidoscopic opening sequence, we see the venerable hotel lobby, long a site of social mixing, as the slowly evolving quintessence of this marriage of public function and private space. We recognize, for example, not only that this lobby evolves from the Roman city’s public venues as they are captured by Nolli’s map but that it is the logical next iteration of the nineteenth-century U.S. public sphere—a place in which the hotel and its venerable lobby loomed large. In the 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant, a lover of fine cigars and brandy, embraced the neoclassical foyer of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., as an escape from the oppressive formality of the White House, but found himself besieged by a swirl of “damned lobbyists,” thereby coining the political phrase that would continue to signal the hotel’s foundational role in the public domain.

But if, in Grant’s day, the entrance hall of the hotel was once merely a neutral meeting ground for self-interested parties, in the age of the service economy it has become far more than that. As Siegfried Kracauer observed in his now iconic “The Hotel Lobby,” a person can, all too easily, “vanish into an undetermined void” while sitting in a hotel lobby, and this is because the hotel lobby offers a sort of groundless distance from the everyday that can be exploited by those who linger on the lobby sofas and overstuffed chairs.⁶ Recently returned to prominence by architects, businesspeople, and hoteliers, it might well be one of the most overdetermined and overtheorized spaces in the modern world. We see this most clearly in the endless repetition of ranked lists—“Coolest Hotel Lobbies” and “15 Hottest Hotel Lobbies”—that marks the space as an object of interest, if not fascination, for the general traveler. “The lobby is the first chapter in the story of your experience at the hotel,” suggests design ingénue, Kelly Wearstler, thinking more broadly; “everything happens there. You arrive, you meet, you leave all through the lobby. It’s one of the souls of the hotel.”⁷ Once a retreat from work, it now sets the tone for a series of escapist and therapeutic interactions.

Detail from “La nuova topografia,” by Giambattista Nolli. (Earth Sciences and Map Library, University of California, Berkeley)

For contemporary architect, Michael Maltzan, the hotel lobby—unlike other public venues such as the beach, the shopping mall, the movie theater, the auditorium, or the amusement park, all of which direct occupants’ attention to a particular object of shared attention whether it is the surf, stores, movies, or rides—offers arguably the best venue for interactive public encounter. The lobby, therefore, is one of the last public spaces geared toward interaction and connection. Other public spaces foster a certain parallelism, encouraging visitors to become an audience witnessing a spectacle, arranging side-by-side seating around the open water, the shimmering film, or the excitement of the ride. A public park might well be a meeting ground, or be occupied by groups with competing interests, but it is designed to foster a solipsistic experience, not a productive mixing of the classes.

At the very street-side front of the hotel, the lobby persists as a common meeting ground for guests and staff, for those new to the hotel and those on their way out, for anyone and everyone who stands on the threshold of the institution, staring into its depths and considering engagement of some kind. But it is also a social site, defined by music, seating, trim detail, and lighting. It is meant to make connections happen, to stage a social mixture. When Dave Horton, head of the Hilton Hotels & Resorts “global brand,” set out to reimagine the aesthetic of the venerable chain, he began with the lobby.⁸ Discouraged by the emphasis on “transitional space all about checking in and going to your room,” Horton and his design team focused on their McLean, Virginia, hotel and in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Hotel Life
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Space
• Time
• Scale
• Affect
• Coda
• Notes
• Index