The Hotel

The Hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland by Jean Nouvel 

The Hotel, a renovation in Lucerne, Switzerland by the French architect Jean Nouvel, connotes a place of fantasy. A place where dreams come true, just like in the movies. Nouvel's impetus for projecting film stills (including Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Federico Fellini's Casanova, and Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, among others) upon the ceilings of The Hotel's guest rooms may not be its connection to filmic fantasy, but a hotel, or transient lodging in general, definitely has many relationships to the medium of film.

One of the most interesting relationships drawn between hotels and film exists in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, in which a Japanese tourist in Memphis takes pictures, not of famous sites, but of his hotel room. His reasoning rests in the memorability of unique sites and attractions versus the forgetfulness of hotel rooms. To this character the transient places he moves through have just as much, if not more, significance than the notable destinations. Most films aren't as direct in connecting movies and hotels. Instead the majority of dramas use hotels as a stage for important events: discovery in Barton Fink, delusion in The Shining, deceit in Last Year at Marienbad, and death in Psycho. The hotel becomes a stage for change, as it is a transition between point A and point B: home and away, life and death.

Is Nouvel simply reversing this relationship that exists, or is he attempting to comment on people and their actions? With society's level of self-consciousness higher than ever before one thing rarely affects another without it being affected upon as well. Reality does not affect film without film affecting reality. Nouvel must be aware of this reciprocity and that hotels are viewed as places where romance will be played out "just like in the movies". The hotel has always existed as a place free from the bondage and security of home, as a escape, though reading the hotel as informed by film adds another layer of meaning that Nouvel's design attempts to explicate, or at least question.

As described above, the primary design gesture of The Hotel is rooms illuminated by projections of film stills. The examples listed all have one thing in common: they deal with the complexities of love, albeit in very different ways. By focusing on love stories, and scenes that suggest sex, the guest is explicitly aware of the hotel's role as a place for romance and change, at least in the world of film. Most impressively though Nouvel articulates the public spaces of the hotel (lobbies, bars, restaurant) as a 3-dimensional continuation of the 2-dimensional gesture within the rooms. The transparency and reflectivity of the glass, in concert with the minimal lighting, creates a mood of voyeurism in which the guest becomes director, or actor, in a variation on the films playing out overhead.