2019
Honorable Mention | Switch Hotel Competition
The project speculates a new form of hotel through the development of an architectural system that taps into existing neighborhood conditions. First, a building’s internal vertical circulation is exposed and expanded. A new hotel module is integrated into this system, effectively providing the existing building a new floor and additional unit. Thus, each hotel module is owned by the building it is attached to below. Its owners may use the addition as a short-term ‘AirBnB’ space, a longer-term rentable unit, as a bonus room when friends and family visit, or at some point, a combination of all of the above.
These modules are also connected to each other through a system of catwalks and walkways above the existing roofline, creating a new elevated nomadic ‘neighborhood.’ In this sense, a type of hotel cooperative is developed. It is up to the owners of this group network to decide how much operational, aesthetic, and financial interaction they will have with each other. Because the module is developed at the unit scale, the size of the hotel is variable, and can range from a single room, to an entire networked city.
Ultimately, the ambition of the project is to create a flexible system for a new hotel typology; one that creates new possibilities of urban and social interaction – between permanent residents and nomads, inhabitants of a single building, and across buildings and blocks – as well as develops a unique urban morphological condition that both integrates with and remains autonomous to the existing city.
