Donald Albrecht
On hotels as design laboratories
By Scott Hume, Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, October 15, 2002
Hotels and restaurants hold special places in the social fabric and the individual psyche that warrant consideration in their creation. At once both public and private, they cater to intimacies of home life—sleeping and eating—in away-from-home environments. The contradictions provide mystery and excitement that the best hotels and restaurants understand and manipulate.
The design of public spaces holds a particular fascination for Donald Albrecht. Exhibitions curator at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, Albrecht has staged a series of shows that explore relationships between design and everyday life. The latest exhibition, “New Hotels for Global Nomads,” is on view from Oct. 29 through March 2, 2003. Combining actual and conceptual examples of hotel designs along with music and videos, the exhibition celebrates the magic of the public/private-space contradictions that can—should, says Albrecht—be incorporated into creation of any foodservice operation.
“I have always been interested in design that has a social dimension,” says the 51-year-old Albrecht, who will be speaking about hotel design on Nov. 11 at the International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show in New York City.
“Over the last four to five years, anybody who really looks at what’s happening in design has seen the hotel coming back as a major laboratory for design ideas,” he says of the exhibition’s genesis. “The urban hotel has been coming back and hotel restaurants once again are fashionable places to be not only for guests in the hotel but for local people as well.
“Fifty years ago, you went to the Starlight Roof of The Waldorf-Astoria, but 10 years ago, people weren’t going to hotel restaurants. Now the hotel restaurant is again becoming significant. The hotel lobby that once was a civic living room where people met each other” is reprising that role, Albrecht says.
“A hotel is a fascinating place,” he says. “Being a home away from home, it is a hybrid environment. You do things there that you do at home but unlike home you have grand public spaces like the lobby and the restaurant. [These public and private areas allow you to] have a more-public fantasy life but also do something so private as sleep. There’s no other environment like that, which gives [hotels] their edge.”
Historically, hotels have been laboratories for technology as well as design. They were the first places many people encountered electricity and elevators. More recently, they offered cable television before it arrived in most homes. “Hotels have been a major influence on social innovation,” Albrecht says. “They were places you could try new technologies in a domestic setting you might be afraid to try at home.”
Hotel planners and architects are reawakening to the responsibilities—especially for imaginative and innovative design—that accompany the hotel’s unique status and role, Albrecht says. He points to Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide’s development of its stylish W hotels, the ultrachic Ian Shrager Hotels and Kimpton Group’s boutique hotels as important departures from midcentury architectural trends.
“Hotels were always a part of cities, and as cities have come back, hotels have come back with them,” Albrecht argues. “As cities have become safer, people have been more willing to go to public spaces that engage the city rather than be bunkers.”
Renovations to the Broadway Lounge and other restaurants in the New York Marriott Marquis on Times Square (see “Sophisticated Informality,” p. 54) are indicative of the trend, Albrecht says. “The Broadway Lounge now looks out to the street rather than in. It invites the environment in rather than creating [an internal environment].
“People have gotten tired of cookie-cutter hotels, of central atriums that enclose and look in.”
Some public-space developers have retreated from designs that are too edgy, fearing they are incompatible with post-terrorism sensibilities. Albrecht asserts that comfort-food menus need not preclude innovative environments.
“You’ve got a generation that grew up on MTV for whom expectations of design in an environment are high,” he says. “And hotels are one of the places that meet those expectations.”
Those who use hotels as places in which to do business also have high—if often less shrill—design expectations, seeking public spaces that reflect the bold modernity of a global economy.
A native of Chicago, where he graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology, Albrecht worked as an architect before cofounding New York City’s American Museum of the Moving Image. His interests in films and architecture have found outlets in “Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner” (Prestel USA, 1997), which he coedited, and his “Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies” (Hennessey & Ingalls, 2001).
Many films have recognized and used to good effect hotels’ and restaurants’ “combination of public spaces and private functions,” he says. “There is a sense of fantasy about the mysterious things that go on behind hotel doors.”
Albrecht has celebrated restaurant design in other Cooper-Hewitt shows he has curated during his six years with the museum. Two years ago, “The Opulent Eye of Alexander Girard” examined the work of a man who changed the look of the American workplace as director of design for one of the nation’s largest office-furnishings companies and who bucked the bland sameness of 1950s suburban homes with ideas such as the “conversation pit” living room.
One of his greatest achievements (though belittled at the time) was the interior he designed for La Fonda del Sol, an upscale Mexican restaurant that Jerome Brody and Joseph Baum’s Restaurant Associates opened in New York City in 1956. With its sun motif and adobe bar, it was an ahead-of-its-time anticipation of the themed casual-dining restaurants that blossomed in the 1980s.
Albrecht invited Baum—who also created The Four Seasons and Windows on the World restaurants—and designers Philip George, Milton Glaser and Hugh Hardy for a symposium on “The New York Dining Experience” that was a part of Cooper-Hewitt’s Girard exhibition.
If there is a continuum uniting the shows Albrecht has curated, it is that they stress the interfaces of design with society, he says. The purpose of design is to improve everyday life, not to be apart from the everyday or to be studied in an academic vacuum, he insists.
Overall, Albrecht is optimistic about recent trends in hotel design. In addition to W hotels—”which really are Sheraton hotels using design as a way to reach a new market,” he says—he notes the involvement of famed designers Philippe Starck and Anda Andrei in the creation of Ian Shrager Hotels, including the Royalton, Paramount and Hudson hotels in New York City and the Clift in San Francisco.
The conversion of landmark buildings and office buildings into hotels also is an encouraging sign of design’s re-emergence, he says. Kimpton Group’s Hotel Burnham in Chicago is housed in the Reliance Building, an 1895 masterpiece from architectural pioneers Daniel Burnham, John Root and Charles Atwood. The Loews Philadelphia Hotel occupies the PSFS Building, built in 1932 and regarded as the first Modernist skyscraper.
“The locations, the architectural detail and the floor sizes for some of these buildings are really more suited for hotels than for office buildings,” Albrecht says. They are ideal blends of cities’ pasts and the present.
“Hotels are a great example of design in everyday life that people ‘get,’” he says. “They are not purely about aesthetics but [about] design in the service of lives.” —Scott Hume
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