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[Text: The external façade of a building is very telling. For a
hotel, the impression a guest or customer forms of it is from its exterior. The
outside provides a way-finding for them, and encapsulates their experience in
the hotel by being the first and last thing they see.
For our Utopian Garden City hotel, we wanted to form a
shared space where people are directed through the building by how the spaces
are planned. The hotel begins in the inside space of the teleport room, and
from there the circular walkways direct you around the open rooms in the centre
of the structure. This would encourage interaction with the other visitors in
the hotel, instead of the usual closeted use of hotel rooms which guests would
only use to sleep in.
We also wanted to create an entrancing visual experience.
The curved structure combined with the movement of the water texture creates a
subtle optical illusion – the façade is fixed yet it feels fluid. It interacts
with the edge of the water it sits on. As you walk through the spaces, the
boundaries of inside space and outside space are merged.]
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[Text: For the façade of our second hotel, in Halloway’s ruined
city, we wanted to make something that would sit high on top of the
skyscrapers. This was inspired by a moment in ‘The Ultimate City’, when
Halloway first flew in to the abandoned city and was faced with these giant
office buildings emerging from nowhere. In the same way, we wanted out hotel to
have a big visual impact.
Another significant moment in the short story was when Halloway
began to bring his city to life:
“A Gasoline-driven
generator in the entrance hall was soon pounding way, its power supply plugged
into the mains. …Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness
interrupted every now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching
units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away along the Sound.”
With this idea, we screened the side of our façade with
static TV screens, using rotating textures of pixelated static and alpha
channels to give a realistic effect. The rooms that hang from the ceiling
illustrate “the city being itself.” “It was only now,” JG Ballard writes, “in
this raucous light and noise … only in this flood of cheap neon that it was
really alive.” The panels that change colour frantically and imitate the pixels
of a TV. The interior is also dimly lit with yellow light to resemble the feel
of city street lamps.
The ‘wings’ of the structure subtly respond to the movement
of the avatar, moving slowly up and down.
All together, we wanted to the guests to feel the assurance
of the city’s visual noise that most people take comfort in.]
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