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A-Hotel

Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece, 14th Venice Biennale, Fundamentals, Venice, Italy, 2014

“A hotel is a plot- a cybernetic universe with its own laws generating random but fortuitous collisions between human beings who would never have met elsewhere.” Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York.

The stereotypical relationship between the idyllic landscape of the greek island and the machine that inhabits it becomes a typological clash between the container and its content. The hotel becomes a cinematic set between natural and synthetic/man-made.
The hotel rooms are laid upon the natural terrain, and define a closed perimeter: a new “inside”/interior that promises a new “outside”/exterior.The terrain is at once the contained and the container. A thick, performative surface is articulated on top of the confined shape of the rooms, camouflaging the square enclosure, while also establishing/unfolding the basis for the public space of the hotel. A synthetic landscape develops on the draped surface, mimicking the natural one by offsetting it. The private area is concealed while the public universe of the hotel is celebrated. The concealment device becomes a mega-platform, a cinematic setting, where the script of the hotel is played out. The synthetic landscape is wild and native, a designed facsimile of the natural one that hovers 10 meters above it. Islands / stages, emerge from the dry underbrush: a swimming pool, a court, an open-air restaurant float amongst the bushes. An internal perimetrical corridor connects all the rooms with the entrance and provides access to the platforms above. The rooms hide behind a thick facade that provides three-dimensional openings towards the sea views, while at the same time hosting the showers triggering a cathartic process vis-a-vis the horizon.
Each island / stage hosts different episodes out of the hotel everyday plot: swimming pool, restaurant, events space, courts, open air cinema. In this archipelago of activities, the actions merge and entangle, rendering the platforms simultaneously poly- and a-programmatic.

PROJECT TEAM:
Sofia Krimizi, Kyriakos Kyriakou with Yubi Park & Artemis Theodorou