Hotel L'informe: using the hotel to implicate social and cultural indifference
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2007
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Abstract
The 'culture industry' is a concept developed by cultural critic Theodor Adorno to describe how entertainment and leisure time, privilege, vacant aesthetics, and materialistic consumption preoccupy the Western social majority. Involvement in the culture industry results in a degradation of subjectivity and the propagation of indifference. Architecture's involvement in the culture industry is most pronounced in the up-scale or grand hotel. The grand hotel envelops its guests in the pretty and seemingly harmonious aesthetic of the culture industry, encouraging them to 'get away from it all' by preoccupying the guests with the hotel's enchantment and amenities. Meanwhile, pressing social and cultural ailments are segregated to the exterior to the hotel's confines. Adorno suggests that instilling a sense of tension within the aesthetic conditions found in the products of the culture industry through the inclusion of that which is not socially preapproved (the ugly within the pretty), may disrupt the culture industry's influence. As a stratified typology serving the entire social spectrum, the hotel manifests itself in various formal and functional variations. It can be the pretty grand hotel, a product of the culture industry serving the affluent, but also the lodging hotel, an ugly strictly utilitarian product serving the destitute population marginalized by the culture industry, the working poor and homeless. After a description of the two hotel types, there will be a more thorough exploration of the concept of the culture industry and of the tension which has the potential to disrupt it. This formulation of tension will then be transposed to an architectural methodology through a comparison of Adorno's formulation of the ugly/pretty and George Bataille's conception of l 'informe (the formless). Finally, this methodology will be applied to the design of a hotel with the intention to disrupt the culture industry's propagation of indifference within the grand hotel by placing a lodging hotel within it. The ornate neo-classical Bank of Montreal building on the Northeast corner of Stephen Avenue and 1st Southwest, Calgary, AB will be the site of this exploration.
Description
Bibliography: p. 80-81
Some pages are in colour.
Some pages are in colour.
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Citation
Gracey, B. (2007). Hotel L'informe: using the hotel to implicate social and cultural indifference (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/1137