New Hotel for Global Nomads:

A man who had been mulling over a sound-modulating bench with his companion used verbal shorthand to explain the depth of this next exhibit, representing a design for the "Hotel Pro Forma," a conceptual project for Denmark. "It's WYSIWYG," he said.

"I'm not familiar with them," his companion replied.

Refreshingly though, What You See Is What You Get doesn't begin to describe "New Hotels for Global Nomads," the exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum where the man and his companion pondered the Hotel Pro Forma. That one man's thought-provoking concept piece is another one's head-scratcher is a given, and Cooper-Hewitt embraces this creative dichotomy with a spirit of both whimsy and exploration as it tackles the possible future and recent past of hotel design. At times alternating between thought-provoking and nostalgic, hokey and very smart, the museum executes the exhibit's core purpose—demonstrating the history of hotels as design laboratories and fantasy experiences—with enthusiasm and success. In dissecting the parts that strive to make the whole—urbanism, mobility, business, nature and fantasy—you can find the matters to quibble with.

The Cooper-Hewitt's Donald Albrecht plays both curator and benefactor with his exhibit, reconnecting with urban hotels' pasts in the catalogue and riffing on possible futures in a number of exclusive commissioned works. In between are a host of projects, realized or only dreamed, that chart the contemporary boon in all aspects of the hotel experience. The breadth of the included works is the show's core strength. Where else will you see images of Jean Nouvel Atelier's work side-by-side with a heart-shaped whirlpool?

 

 "New Hotels" begins beyond a screen of front-desk bells. Do not disturb tags, room keycards and other hotel paraphernalia appear as decorative motifs throughout. It's not until you move through a few rooms that things begin to get interesting. Video artist Jeff Gompertz has made a video of people using Japanese capsule hotel units (he certainly has a future as a security guard) that should be quickly ignored in favor of crawling in one of the four capsules on display. Once you get past the notion that you're inside a horizontal refrigerator, what works with the capsules—the simplicity, the quiet, the basic needs it meets—may make you consider a family vacation in Japan. Adjacent to the capsules you can walk through a portion of Joel Sanders Architect's "24/7" room. Sanders's work is a hyped-up Ryokan room for the 21st century-high-tech and multipurpose yet sparse. The full-scale model only hints at the design's potential.

Around the side of Sanders' work is a clever piece by Diller + Scofidio. In "Interclone Hotel" a quartet of identical rooms in Mexico, India, Vietnam and Uganda are overlaid with different decorating patterns and legends depicting local socioeconomic conditions. The wit of the project is fleeting, though. Perhaps it's better suited to the pages of a magazine than to an exhibit. You'll likely find yourself drawn back across the room to a video monitor recycling Spike Jonze's "Weapon of Choice" video. Christopher Walken dancing in a dim LA hotel lobby is always more interesting than a designer's sermonette.

A hallway lined with over 700 postcards of motels and some hotels is the only detailed appearance that the motel makes in "New Hotels" and it's out of place. If hotels are a place to experiment with design and fantasy in an urban context, motels are something entirely different. A response to our post-WWII obsession with the automobile and mobility, the motel meets a generally divergent set of needs. Then again, maybe Albrecht thought they were just an interesting decorating spin for the hallway, which they are.

The show really picks up speed on the second floor because of an eclectic playfulness that's largely missing from the first floor. It's up here where photos of Jean Nouvel Atelier's The Hotel in Lucerne aren't far from a tub out of the Mt. Airy Lodge in the Poconos. With its film stills of couples projected onto the ceiling, The Hotel offers an enlarged and glorified reflection of visitors' pending or imagined eroticism. It's not a far leap, then to the novelty tubs and mirror-ceiling rooms of romance hideaways like the Mt. Airy Lodge

 

Nearby, there's an entire room devoted to the hideously decorated Burj Al-Arab Hotel in Dubai. The giant, graceful sail-like exterior is familiar to anyone who's picked up a travel magazine in the last few years. The interior is another story. Inside is an arrogance of color, shape and movement unseen since Napoleon's interior decorator shook off his gilded mortal coil. When leopard and other animal prints constitute the most conservative decorating motif, you know that something's gone horribly, terribly wrong. It's such an ostentatious display of misguided wealth that its only real purpose is to serve as a monument to hubris.

Which of course leads us to Vegas.

Albrecht commissioned photographer Richard Barnes to capture the ultimate hotel town in a series of photos called "The New Las Vegas." Vegas, with its false facades and commercialism is rife for over-explaining and paternalism by academics and designers, but Albrecht and Barnes avoided these missteps. Barnes' photographs instruct us that Vegas is the best incubator of the 21st century hotel. It's the ideal new hotel city: projects can go up, become occupied, get demolished and begun anew with a speed impossible in any other city. In Barnes' photos you can glimpse a half-dozen faux European cities spread across the Nevada horizon. In this examination more than any other in the exhibit you get a real sense of the global hotel industry at both its most democratic and most capitalistic.

There's a gallery devoted to the themes of Hotels on the Move and Natural Hotels that's entirely a thrill. Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis have created a hotel that extends the package tour experience vertically into the hotel room. Feeling moon-struck? Hans-Jurgen Rombaut's Lunatic Hotel gives you a room on the moon in a theoretical yet highly pragmatic project. ROY principal Lindy Roy's three ecological resort projects confront the trickier side of nature along with its beauty. The Wind River Lodge in Alaska is a starting off point for extreme skiers, Okavango Delta Spa in Botswana creates a sense of peace in a floating environment, and the Cancer Alley project in Louisiana somehow manages to make toxic pollution hip.

 

The successful commissioned works break down components or desires of a room into instructive and inventive packages. Tom Sachs' "Compact Full Feature Hotel Room" and M.K. Kähne's "Sanitary Furniture" package parts of the hotel experience. But of these new works Toland Grinnell's "Private Dancer" is the most exciting. The sleek, self-contained dance platform, sound system, mini-bar and primping station can be rolled into a room and out again with little fuss. With its black leather, platinum studs, brown satin, recessed lights, mirrors and brandy snifters for two "Dancer" emotes a packaged sensuality that the consumer goods it's sending up could only aspire to. More a promise of sex than the actual thing (a Victoria Secret catalogue, not a night with a lover), it's the perfect commentary on fashion as sex.

Another commissioned work is worth noting only for its failure to do, say or be anything. The wall notation for Dike Blair's "#1289, Seekonk, MA" tries to convince the visitor that it "subverts the homogeneity of American chain motels." Well, no it doesn't. Rather, it deftly exposes the banality of Dike Blair's gallery installations.

It's a disappointment that this and Diller + Scofidio's "Interclone" diversion are the only efforts the exhibit makes to address homogeneity, and that they take such a superficial (and unsuccessful) jab at chain operations. Although they couldn't cop to it, the modern boutique hotels and the designers creating their looks struggle with it just as much as Wyndham and Hilton. Two years ago it was wheat grass on every check-in desk and a Philippe Starck chair in every room. Now it's mismatched lumpy, anorexic and painful furniture in lobbies and pedestal sinks in every bathroom. The Rande Gerber–run bar and the CD library have become almost as ubiquitous as the continental breakfast. Whether you're checking into the Hudson in New York or the Clift in San Francisco you're guaranteed to be both charmed and frustrated by designers' "quirky" tricks (dangerously low lighting, fragile headboards). And you still can't go anywhere without tripping over something by Starck.
 

Standard, Hollywood, 1999, Shawn Hausman Photo © Tim Street-Porter. Courtesy André Balazs Even with their sins, considering all the energy the modern boutique hotels have infused the hotel industry with their presence in the exhibit is rather brief. A limited number of photos of André Balazs' built and unbuilt Standard hotels, Starwood's W hotels, and Ian Schrager's Clift, Sanderson and St. Martins Lane line walls on the first floor. Show underwriter Loews Hotel includes a rather modest number of tired press kit photos of their conversion of the International Style PSFS Building into the Loews Philadelphia Hotel.

What Albrecht and his fellow curators manage to do--especially with the mix of commissioned and exploratory works on the second-floor--is remind the visitor of the excitement of motion and ending up in a new place. In recent years hotels have again become as much a reason to travel as the cities in which they're located.