Hotel Management and Architecture

Keen to take a break from routine, we often hope to get away from the habitual and summon the desirable versions of ourselves in order to take on a different perspective to look at the world. But change is not always easy. One possible reason is that we tend to think of our homes as anchors of identities. If homes are indicators of who we are, it is perhaps because they are often the material articulation of what we think a good life is. Not only they help lay down a framework of our identities, but they also subtly suggest the values we hold dear to.

However, problems arise because our homes are often reluctant to change. Our furniture and decor implicitly suggest that the values we are liable to adopt are more praiseworthy than the ones that are left unexplored. But there are times when we doubt whether we are heading to the wrong direction and are no longer sure who we really are. Hence, in order to get away from our moral confusions and the chatter of societies, a change is needed. The solution is travel.

Only until we encounter a temple in Kyoto, an exotic palm tree, a landscape of Dutch modernist houses, we may venture to revise our previous assumptions of life and initiate a breakthrough. Unfortunately, aside from cities like Las Vegas, books and tour guides written on the subject tend to seduce us to generate a receptivity to famous tourist sites instead of the places all tourists and travelers are necessarily clung to, namely, hotels.

Travel guides often avoid in-depth descriptions of hotels except matters regarding prices, the kinds of restaurants, and the kinds of entertainments as if hotels are merely a means to shelters. To exaggerate the facilities in hotels is to disregard the settings and the layout of them, that is, the architecture itself and how it may be beneficial to the people. But tourism is a field that is constantly evolving. It often investigates what may attract tourists and how it may improve the general quality of travel. If tourism is a field that constantly demands new ideas, why can't we direct our focus on hotels as ideal tour sites rather than cliche landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Tokugawa Castle? Can we not spend more time in hotels that we favour instead of forcing ourselves to be moved to tears by what all tourists are supposed to like?

Hotels, like airports, may be thought to be centres of cultural diversity and globalisation where people from all over the world, through the struggle of choices of hotels that are available, finally settle on a particular one to be their temporary homes. It is interesting to witness how many people with different cultural backgrounds envisage an identical vision of happiness, offering conclusive evidence of a global village. Yet hotels are far from being merely shelters whose rooms offer comfortable beds for us to stretch our legs, wrap ourselves up with blankets, and extinguish consciousness for several hours. They operate like our homes, suggesting a certain visions of what we might want to become.

If buildings are meant to be functional, yet translations of our psychological make-up, we may be tempted to look at the Villa Savoye at the summit of Poissy constructed by the renowned French architect Le Corbusier. Though Le Corbusier once remarked that the sole function of a house was shelter against severe weather and to accommodate us with a range of activities such as cooking that were essential to our survival, it seemed rather hard not to detain our attention when the flat roof sprang a leak in a bedroom where the boy of the Savoye family suffered from a chest infection because of the amount of water the roof had invited during rainy days. However functional Le Corbusier insisted the house was, what motivated him to construct the house was aesthetic interest rather than practical concerns. Behind this principally technological house lies the implicit attempt to support a way of life that appealed to the modernists: science, technology, efficiency, democracy etc. Le Corbusier wished the house to contribute to a certain mood, a transubstantiation of what we value into a material medium. How ironic the fact that he subtly designed a house out of beauty that was theoretically justified on technological terms rendered it uninhabitable.

For architectural gravity, many great religions are its practitioners. Over the course of human history, we have constructed temples, churches, and cathedrals to enforce our moral aspirations within ourselves. In the face of financial necessity, political disgrace, and romantic pessimism, the heaviness concentrated upon our mortal souls is perhaps too great to be fortified within our material casings. Hence we are tempted to inscribe certain values on works of architecture to act as sobering reminders of what we hold dear to. Gazing at the coloured windows that depict the story of Christ and frescos that illustrate the majesty of God at once harbours within us a feeling of solemn awe and force us to contemplate ideas that might have been inconceivable in the commercial world. Surrounded by the Gothic grandeur, ideas that might seem laughable in the secular world would begin to make sense and assume an air of sanity, for works of architecture beautifully administer the correct dosage of our missing virtues we wish to savour in our hearts.

Therefore, if we wish to change ourselves through travel, can we not regard hotels the kinds of places that help enforce the aspirations we wish to secure? If they are our temporary anchors of our undiscoverable identities, can we not direct our energy towards where we want to stay at instead of dedicating at full force our geographical interests to the place where we set foot on? The field of hotel management has long rested the improvements of hotels on the regulation of prices, the sorts of facilities, and customer service. Yet the notion of architecture largely leaves unnoticed, if noticed, neglected.

If the field of hotel management is to make some serious progress, perhaps its practitioners may need to invite architects to reconcile beauty with what is functional. There comes the time where we need to find a balance between hotels and the destination that can supposedly change us. The value of a beautiful work of architecture lies in its ability to grant us permanent access to certain emotional textures that allows us to arrest the transient moments, and solidify them, the kind of things that a beach or an exotic plant might not profess to do. It allows us to experience certain visions of a good life which we can regularly attend to.

What makes hotels significant is that they are the only places that retain the possibility to strike us with familiarity when we travel abroad. Through a setting that differs greatly from our homes, our continued exposure to it, rather than the places we tend to only visit once upon travel, suggests that the qualities contained within the hotel may assume a greater hold on us. It makes allowance for the possibility to bind our emotions to the fabric of our temporary homes, project them up to the sky, and reflect them back onto the ones that are located thousand miles away.

We shouldn't be repelled by Wittgenstein's claim that doing philosophy is nothing compared to being a good architect. A beautifully constructed hotel not only inspires examination of one's own self, but also reflects the values of the place where it is situated. It seeks to compress all the memorial qualities of a place and translate them into a material language we are all inclined to understand- so to hope to reform our deeply flawed characters. Upon travel, perhaps nothing can be more tiresome than selecting a hotel to fathom our souls.

W