More than Hotel
Digital Exhibition
Project Description
About
Free Master Thesis
Martina Hügli
info@martinahuegli.com
www.martinahuegli.com
For generations, people from all over Europe make their yearly pilgrimage to the coast of the Mediterranean. Places along its shores experience a seasonal rhythm of visitors that aligns with the temperature curves increasing during the summer months.
Two years ago, I spent a more extended period in Istria, the northernmost peninsula of Croatia. The coastline of this part of the Adriatic is characterized by karstic mountain ranges that transform into green coasts with lush pine tree forests – an image composing the ideal holiday. Unspoilt landscapes and untouched histories have remained guiding principles of tourism to this day. These principles have more recently been extended by the notion of a transcendence of mass tourism through the authentic, real, or local experience. But this denunciation of masses through the authentic is a fallacy since there is no inherently good or bad tourism, let alone a real or fake experience.
This becomes tangible once we understand that the permanent population of these places ceaselessly works to meet the touristic expectations, through a continuous spatial fixing of tourism landscapes.
The approach of summer corresponds to a bi-annual shift of social and other types of infrastructures for the city’s permanent population. The ceaseless staging of tourism means that they evade masses in the old town during summer by visiting cafés at supermarkets next to big ring roads or other places in the urban fringes.
The City of Pula experienced a 10% population decline from 2011 to 2021. Moreover, the monthly average rent increased to €933, whereas the mean monthly salary remained at €969. Changes that can be linked to the growing amount of tourists visiting the region and city each year.
Karel Teige’s work on the minimum dwelling is interesting in this regard, as it makes an link between hotels and the housing crisis. Teige refers to the hotel as one of the first prosecutors of the proletarian dwelling, by which he means a dwelling with one room, where the apartment is reduced to an individual living cell. The need for minimum dwelling, in Teige's words, comes from cities failing to provide opportunities for decent human living. In the case of the Adriatic, tourism has been meticulously planned over the past 80 years, but the planning of the required number of dwellings to enable decent human living has always remained in the realm of tourism.
Even though large-scale hotels from the 1960s that are classical monocultures of leisure can be seen as part of the problem, I argue that they are not the source of the problem. They are infrastructures of tourism where the numbers become tangible through their facades and balconies, and where a conscious exposure or withdrawal to tourism is possible.
To me, the problem instead much rather lies in the fact that 62% of tourist nights in Croatia are spent in private accommodations such as Airbnb. They proliferate the city, and over time, whole inner cities become monocultures of leisure, rather than just hotel islands at the city’s fringes. Today, 25% of the apartments in the historic inner city of Pula are Airbnbs. They are a vital additional source of income for many inhabitants, so a ban for me, is not an option.
Could we, instead, use Teige’s link between hotels and housing and combine hotel capacity planning and housing capacity planning in these Airbnb structures? In this model, the "More than Hotel" living cycles are no longer detached but overlayed through adding an infrastructural extension in the backyards of the existing houses that enables permanent and temporary living to coexist in one space. This questions the front and backstage moments of tourism, the real and fake experience. Permanent and Temporary residents meet on eye level again, with a key handover that clearly defines the roles in the tourist play. As the city cannot own all airbnb’s, the project also proposes a central hotel room structure at the headquartes of the former shipyard Uljanik, in order to restore equilibrium between temporary and permanent inhabitants.
In Yugoslavia, hotels fostered socialist tourism, introducing a new urban layer through lobbies, restaurants, or bars open to all and serving as public spaces designated to mediate between the collective and individual spheres. The More Than Hotel takes up on that notion in that it programmatically includes existing public infrastructures as part of its hotel spaces, such as libraries, cinemas and conference halls. And what's missing is introduced at the site of the former shipyard headquarters beneath and next to the new hotel rooms. What once was the shipyard industry is now the tourism industry and will become the city wide hotel's central lobby or living room, café, kitchen & dining room, but also the spaces for housekeeping and the hotel laundry, that are no longer hidden out of sight. Finally, the former war harbour that borders the shipyard becomes a protected underwater garden with a Posidonia oceanica nursery, a plant that stores up to 15x more co2 than trees, and once dead, can be used for the construction of insulation for the newly built houses. These prefab panels are produced in the abandoned shipbuilding halls, together with the prefab metal elements for the houses made out of the remains of the shipyard. These metal scraps currently hinder access to the island in the city bay. The production of the Hotel thus empties the island of ship waste and opens up possibilities for appropriation.
Ultimately, the More Than Hotel counteracts tourism dynamics by bringing lives of permanent and temporary residents of the city in close proximity and on eye-level again. It opens possibilities to re-writing narratives of tourism that have remained the same for the past 150 years. There is no real experience, and everyone's a tourist. To overcome the burdens of over-tourism, we, as a society, must finally acknowledge that there is nothing inherently bad with being a tourist, but rather with how we continuously distinguish ourselves from others as a justification that our travels are not doing harm. Instead, we could reflect on how we conspicuously consume the places we visit, how often and what we do when we visit them. We can make tourism productive for "more than just pleasure" in service of climate and social issues and make the world more hospitable.
Two years ago, I spent a more extended period in Istria, the northernmost peninsula of Croatia. The coastline of this part of the Adriatic is characterized by karstic mountain ranges that transform into green coasts with lush pine tree forests – an image composing the ideal holiday. Unspoilt landscapes and untouched histories have remained guiding principles of tourism to this day. These principles have more recently been extended by the notion of a transcendence of mass tourism through the authentic, real, or local experience. But this denunciation of masses through the authentic is a fallacy since there is no inherently good or bad tourism, let alone a real or fake experience.
This becomes tangible once we understand that the permanent population of these places ceaselessly works to meet the touristic expectations, through a continuous spatial fixing of tourism landscapes.
The approach of summer corresponds to a bi-annual shift of social and other types of infrastructures for the city’s permanent population. The ceaseless staging of tourism means that they evade masses in the old town during summer by visiting cafés at supermarkets next to big ring roads or other places in the urban fringes.
The City of Pula experienced a 10% population decline from 2011 to 2021. Moreover, the monthly average rent increased to €933, whereas the mean monthly salary remained at €969. Changes that can be linked to the growing amount of tourists visiting the region and city each year.
Karel Teige’s work on the minimum dwelling is interesting in this regard, as it makes an link between hotels and the housing crisis. Teige refers to the hotel as one of the first prosecutors of the proletarian dwelling, by which he means a dwelling with one room, where the apartment is reduced to an individual living cell. The need for minimum dwelling, in Teige's words, comes from cities failing to provide opportunities for decent human living. In the case of the Adriatic, tourism has been meticulously planned over the past 80 years, but the planning of the required number of dwellings to enable decent human living has always remained in the realm of tourism.
Even though large-scale hotels from the 1960s that are classical monocultures of leisure can be seen as part of the problem, I argue that they are not the source of the problem. They are infrastructures of tourism where the numbers become tangible through their facades and balconies, and where a conscious exposure or withdrawal to tourism is possible.
To me, the problem instead much rather lies in the fact that 62% of tourist nights in Croatia are spent in private accommodations such as Airbnb. They proliferate the city, and over time, whole inner cities become monocultures of leisure, rather than just hotel islands at the city’s fringes. Today, 25% of the apartments in the historic inner city of Pula are Airbnbs. They are a vital additional source of income for many inhabitants, so a ban for me, is not an option.
Could we, instead, use Teige’s link between hotels and housing and combine hotel capacity planning and housing capacity planning in these Airbnb structures? In this model, the "More than Hotel" living cycles are no longer detached but overlayed through adding an infrastructural extension in the backyards of the existing houses that enables permanent and temporary living to coexist in one space. This questions the front and backstage moments of tourism, the real and fake experience. Permanent and Temporary residents meet on eye level again, with a key handover that clearly defines the roles in the tourist play. As the city cannot own all airbnb’s, the project also proposes a central hotel room structure at the headquartes of the former shipyard Uljanik, in order to restore equilibrium between temporary and permanent inhabitants.
In Yugoslavia, hotels fostered socialist tourism, introducing a new urban layer through lobbies, restaurants, or bars open to all and serving as public spaces designated to mediate between the collective and individual spheres. The More Than Hotel takes up on that notion in that it programmatically includes existing public infrastructures as part of its hotel spaces, such as libraries, cinemas and conference halls. And what's missing is introduced at the site of the former shipyard headquarters beneath and next to the new hotel rooms. What once was the shipyard industry is now the tourism industry and will become the city wide hotel's central lobby or living room, café, kitchen & dining room, but also the spaces for housekeeping and the hotel laundry, that are no longer hidden out of sight. Finally, the former war harbour that borders the shipyard becomes a protected underwater garden with a Posidonia oceanica nursery, a plant that stores up to 15x more co2 than trees, and once dead, can be used for the construction of insulation for the newly built houses. These prefab panels are produced in the abandoned shipbuilding halls, together with the prefab metal elements for the houses made out of the remains of the shipyard. These metal scraps currently hinder access to the island in the city bay. The production of the Hotel thus empties the island of ship waste and opens up possibilities for appropriation.
Ultimately, the More Than Hotel counteracts tourism dynamics by bringing lives of permanent and temporary residents of the city in close proximity and on eye-level again. It opens possibilities to re-writing narratives of tourism that have remained the same for the past 150 years. There is no real experience, and everyone's a tourist. To overcome the burdens of over-tourism, we, as a society, must finally acknowledge that there is nothing inherently bad with being a tourist, but rather with how we continuously distinguish ourselves from others as a justification that our travels are not doing harm. Instead, we could reflect on how we conspicuously consume the places we visit, how often and what we do when we visit them. We can make tourism productive for "more than just pleasure" in service of climate and social issues and make the world more hospitable.