Hotel City
2021 / Mashhad, Iran
Masters Graduation Studio, TU Delft
What happens when tourists reign a city? When endless flows of imported beings form ever-growing mountains of bodies, that roll and spread through the city like tidal waves, covering everything and everywhere. What happens when houses are one-by-one razed to the ground and rebuild as hotels, when precise local craftmanship is replaced by mass-produced knockoffs? What happens when local culture is overthrown in favour of market trends, and traditional rituals have become a trained show that is put on. In other words: what happens when the city itself is commodified into a liveable experience, when the city itself, is the apotheosis of tourism?
Hotel City is a sum of its city’s spaces, structures, smells, and sounds; capable of delivering you an unforgettable experience, that, paradoxically, in some ways is as generic as a hotel room, if it were not for its fantastic cladding. Hotel City is capable of transforming its visitors into absolute believers of whatever reality it has to offer.
Hotel City consists of a series of rooms that were discovered within the city of Mashhad, in which one’s tourist experience is housed. The written essay outlines and introduces the theoretical basis of each room to its reader, while an animated film transports the viewer through these rooms and their thought constructs, intending to confront you with the nature of Hotel City, and leave you with pondering questions behind.
Hotel City marks the research phase of my graduation project,
visit the design phase here: Hidden Myths.
︎︎︎ Read the essay
︎︎︎ Flip the page
︎︎︎ Watch the film