Inn Gibraltar

Abstract

The project deals with the architecture of hospitality. More specifically, it is an investigation of how architecture is used to provide a background to civil society and induce meanings through spatial and structural constructs whose realization is based on exchange value. In the transient territory of Gibraltar, where current and future construction boom run the risk of encouraging local authorities to dispose of land and property assets to real estate developers, the project takes the form of a hotel, with its ability to provide the means through which the relationship between public and private space is negotiated, while capitalizing on the capacity to produce different formats of social encounter. Hence, the modus operandi of this contribution within the grand scheme of things is twofold; The hotel comes in as a point of convergence whose sole purpose is based on continuous movement of people and capital, facilitating the predicted boom of the tourist industry and the increasing influx of people into the territory. More importantly, however, it presents itself as a private commercial venture offering an alternative ground for social and political participation in a privatized city.
It is the political charge of the hotel that this project uses as a means to articulate the civic potential of this particular building type. By introducing politics as a set of activities that take place on the spectrum between public and private, the Inn Gibraltar challenges the hotel as an architectural artifact—with its programmatic, formal, and spatial presence—and its capacity to engender a register of meaning in its own right. To politicize a hotel then means to openly question its importance, not only as a city-forming element, but also as a relevant cultural edifice. To explicate what is often only implicit is to shed light on the forces that shape and will continue to shape not only Gibraltar's, but our urban condition at large. As such the project's main intent is an interrogation of a particular form of hospitality in order to comment on the transfer of responsibility from agencies as different as the state or the family to the corporation.