Doors of perceptions 2: At home: the intro movie.

Airbed & breakfast, the fun & affordable alternative to hotels…

Via archinect. A History of the Hotel, slide show. Apparently the history of the MODERN hotel begins in America…

Screenshot from slide show: “Photograph of demonstration against segregated hotels, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 4, 1962. Bill Young/Atlanta Journal-Constitution.”

“It was only in the 20^th century that American hospitality became truly democratic. Beginning in 1908, E.M. Statler challenged the hotel industry’s attention to the wealthy by declaring that he would offer hospitality “at a price ordinary people can afford.” Statler’s slogan, “A bed and a bath for a dollar and a half,” launched his hotel empire and made him, as a 1950 trade journal put it, “The Hotel Man of the Half Century.” A decade later, the civil rights movement launched a wave of demonstrations against discrimination in travel facilities. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech—which evoked the plight of black wayfarers with the reminder that “our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities”—helped persuade Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations.”

In terms of hotels, I have always liked the caravansérails of the old médinas. Acording to Archnet.org, wich provides you with a dictionary of Islamic architecture, the caravanserai, is a “Roadside building which provides accomodation and shelter for travellers.” Also,

“The term caravanserai is a composite Turkish term derived from caravan (i.e. a group of travellers) and serai (palace). Generally it refers to a large structure which would be capable of coping with a large number of travellers, their animals and goods. The term first seems to have been used in the twelfth century under the Seljuks and may indicate a particularly grand form of khan with a monumental entrance. During the Saffavid period in Iran (seventeenth to eighteenth century) caravanserais are often huge structures with four iwans.”

A hotel for neo-nomads: Everland by Swiss artist-duo Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann.

“Everland is a Hotel with only one room including a bathroom, a king-size bed and a lounge. The bounteous dimensioned room represents the subjective dream of a hotel: the architecture, the playful details, as well as the request to steal the golden embroidered bath towels. All Everland guests are partaking in the project.”

Screenshot from website

Thank you Nanna!

Thanks to Mehdi, some news about hotel innovations: check the Accor Innovation website.

A guided tour of room 307:

“Access to the room is controlled by radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, a solution that Accor developed in cooperation with VingCard Assa Abloy. The door lock opens when it detects a radio frequency microchip in the hotel key card or in a Samsung mobile phone that is scheduled to reach the market in January 2008. The room’s safe also uses this technology. In the next 18 months to three years, all mobile phones worldwide will meet NFC standards and be able to use this technology.”

Check also room 1014.

Suitehotel created nomadsphere, a new community website for architects who want to travel with other nomads:

“ Planning a trip to Berlin? Just connect to www.nomadsphere.com to get in touch with another nomad who shares your interests and just happens to be in Berlin at the same time.”

Personally, I am on so many Social Networking websites that I regularly forget my passwords…

Back from the field, Amsterdam where I stayed at the Lloyd hotel designed by MVRDV, the renowned Dutch architecture firm. I really did like the concept of the Lloyd: it is a 1 to 5 stars hotel, meaning that budget and business travelers mingle. Art brings everyone together:

The hotel’s Cultural Embassy offers various services in communal spaces. Situated above restaurant the Cultural Embassy informs guests and interested parties on topics such as art, culture and cultural projects. In conjunction with the Lloyd Hotel the Cultural Embassy and its members organize projects and cultural activities: performances, small exhibitions and presentations. Admission is always free for everybody.

Some rooms have kinetic architectural elements: cupboards open up to disclose and create a proper space for a bathroom. One advice, make sure you don’t get a room located in the basement!

Cupboard door opening up to give proper space to a bathroom (surface area saving…).

While in Amsterdam I have met with the food designer Debra Solomon, curator of The Edible City exhibit:

The exhibition presents a cross section of pragmatic proposals and utopian schemes that enable cities and city-dwellers to meet their own food requirements. They range from MVRDV’s Pig City and Agroparks to the urban agriculture Cuba found it necessary to develop after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As befits the subject, much of the exhibition is itself edible.

Check Debra’s culiblog!

Studies we conduct are like dyed cloths, those which pigments tint the skin of whom wears it (not unlike the indigo cloth of the Tuareg, the blue man of the desert…). They change us.

Article in the Economist, Home Truth About Telecoms. Technology and Society: Anthropologists investigate the use of communications technology and reach some surprising conclusions:

Of course, improvements to mobile networks and the spread of third-generation (3G) and Wi-Fi networks mean that you no longer need to be at your desk to get things done. But Ms Broadbent found that there is not, in fact, much appetite for working while on the move. Indeed, she calls this “the hypermobility myth”. After studying workers who spend more than half their time out of the office—salesmen, consultants, pilots, journalists and photographers—she found that they generally stick to communications while on the move, gathering information that they then work on when they get back to their desks. Hotel rooms and airports are, she says, “not seen as an appropriate environment for substantive work” and are mainly used for e-mail.

Hotel Fox website:

For the launch of the new Volkswagen Fox 21 international artists from the fields of graphic design, urban art and illustration turned Hotel Fox in central Copenhagen, into the world’s most exciting and creative lifestyle hotel.

Ulrich sent me the paper he wrote with C. M. about Hotel Fox: Creative industries as a cultural resource : how cities can prepare the ground for future leisure offers and demands. Towards a theoretical framework for futurizing the leisure sector. The authors write:

The basic idea behind Project Fox was that Volkswagen didn´t want to organise yet another launch event only geared towards trade journalists but rather try to introduce their new product within the lifeworlds of what was to be called young urban travelers. In taking up this metaphor around urban mobility, the winning event design by eventlabs in Hamburg extended the notion of car travel into tourism and suggested a more long-term transformation of urban space by staging a variety of experiences.

Find the conference website! HotelFox .pdf

St Louis. I find a copy of my bill on the hotel’s interactive television system…

Bill Thompson, an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet wrote Monday 19 March, 2007 an article entitled: In search of the neo-nomad. He writes:

As one of the millions of people who work wherever they happen to find themselves, relying on a laptop and a wireless connection for all their computing needs, I certainly live a nomadic lifestyle, pitching my virtual camp wherever I happen to find myself.

And I’d rather be a neo-nomad than a laptop warrior, a term which was clearly designed to make corporate executives feel that the evenings spent in dull business hotels in Utrecht preparing the monthly sales figures had some heroic aspect.

Nomads certainly have lots of places to settle for an hour or two of work.

And later (I am flattered):

The term neo-nomad has actually been around for a while. Researcher Yasmine Abbas calls her blog neo-nomad, and she has been writing about what she calls “digitally geared people on the move” since 2005.

Abbas is especially interested in how people who work on the move retain a sense of belonging to places and organisations, and at the way new technologies open up new ways of belonging to groups and even companies.

My good friend Simon runs an online recruitment company and it has operated as a hybrid business since it started.

There is a real office, and meetings take place there, but in general the team work remotely from wherever they happen to find themselves, whether that’s in Brighton, Suffolk or Australia.

Here below is an observation that I would like to discuss for that it is often a question that comes up when I make a presentation:

Neo-nomads and digital bedouins sound very exciting, but we mustn’t forget that this will only ever be a viable way of working for a small, skilled and privileged minority of people.

Will be back soon…