Hotel Kebab.
Master thesis at the University Liechtenstein
It is a concept of an Allstar Hotel, which should become a place for everyone, from the millionaires to muslims, from architects to housewives, from cats to backpackers etc. Public space becomes a meeting point for all those diverse social layers. Project can be seen as a critical view point on the society and values.
Plot is situated at a train station in Bregenz, Austria. It is a cultural hub of the Vorarlberg region. It is promoting to be local, but wants to be global and hosts once per year a spectacular Opera event that attracts tourists. It has contradictions and diverse population. After observations it was defined that only public space can become a meeting point for all those diverse social layers. So framing the public space is the goal of the project, meanwhile it would have to have a hotel and train and bus station integrated in itself.
Project can be seen as a critical view point on the society and values. And if values or cultural identities are the most important objective now, or maybe it should rather be the wellbeing of the common living?
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Therefore there were chosen basic "rituals" that exist in each culture and social group. They are almost archaic and suggest the highest interaction. So the hotel is subdivided in three houses: Eating, Playing and Smoking that are getting dissolved in the hypostyle of the open public space of the station. Big scale of the structure marks the place as a Gate to the city of Bregenz and the often grid of the columns brings down the scale and overlaps the private and public. It forms the in between space that regulates the entrances and transitions between the more closed and open spaces.
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Eating exposes the cultural and social belonging and creates a possibility to exchange. Playing comes from the childhood as a tool to learn and creatively simulate the possible situations in life. Smoking is the highest socially interactive activity that works as a place to reflect, meet people and expose the individual violence committed by the social media that imposes a fake mask of a happy and healthy individual that has no worries.
The spaces are augmented and distorted, they invoke to our usual understanding of the space and its functions and reveals its true nature. A table for 80 person in the Eating house crosses three joint rooms of the open kitchen, ruining conventional understanding of the dinning halls which dominate their visitors with their all encompassing void.
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Public laundry becomes an excuse to come to the Playing house. Here you can enjoy socializing, take your kids to a small nursery, record some music in the studio or watch a cinema.
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Smoking place here becomes the most open place for the discussion. Here the conversation would start with a request for a lighter and would dissolve in the smoke mixed with thoughts and dreams, concerns and decisions.
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Contradictions, absurdity and complexity are the reality we are living now, and here architecture responds with diverse layers and juxtapositions. Here, one should mention Venturi, "Simultaneous perception of a multiplicity of levels involves struggles and hesitations for the observer and makes his perception more vivid."(Venturi, R. (1977) Complexity and contradiction in architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 25)
