When hospitality architects dream of defining a city with an iconic hotel, they often look skyward. But their vision need not always be aimed vertically, toward the heavens.
Creating memorable hotel design – through form, image and light – also can draw on a more earthly foothold. At the horizontal level – the landscape at street level – hotel executives and architects imagining stunning definition can transform the space under their feet by focusing on experience.
Lobbies and atria unify and define urban areas and transform user experiences – and they can be as iconic as designs that tower through the clouds. “Ground scrapers” can be powerfully emotive and imaginative.
Today, architects have a unique opportunity to drive iconic design by focusing on leveraging space and objects to create a satisfying customer experience.
Space, objects and experience
Our environment is made up of spaces as well as objects. It is this interplay of objects and space that empowers the experiential nature that defines the environment we inhabit and the experiences we have.
The normal paradigm is that the space between the buildings or within is simply left over and filled with whatever needs to be there out of necessity. However, to design with the experience in mind, there needs to be a new shift – a paradigm shift that integrates the idea of the iconic space with the iconic object, where the two ideas meld into one idea of city, place and building with a unique and connected experience.
Leveraging form for experience
No matter the style of hotel, there is immense potential to leverage the form of the object to enhance the experience. For example, for mid- or low-rise projects, considerations of arrival sequence, spatial sequence and quality are of paramount importance to producing a positive memory of a hotel stay. The iconic in these projects becomes the experience of the connection between the space and the place, rather than the building.
The typology of these low- or mid-rise hotels – the atrium, the courtyard, the block – all become distinctive in their own right and provide opportunities to drive an iconic customer experience through the informed and experiential use of the space. The courtyard-type offers the benefits of being removed from the street and creating an enclosed but uncovered urban room or garden experience – free of the urban noise yet integrated into the urban environment. The atrium-type achieves this in a similar fashion, but with a cover or roof. These spatial hotel types possess a unique quality that can help create an experience comparable to that of their taller counterparts.
Creating an iconic experience
Architects must leverage the hotel design to connect guest to the total experience. This includes urban scale connections to public places, street, squares, event spaces and beaches; the quality at the building scale of arrivals, reception, vertical transportation; and the detail scale, the quality of the rooms, visual connectedness to the skyline, the room configuration and the ability to move.
To best design for the customer’s experience, it’s vital that architects are connected with the kinds of guests the hotel seeks to attract. The profile of each individual guest determines the desire for varying experiences within the hotel. For examples, the millennial generation is apt to find their rooms via an app. Their expectations revolve around happening places, events, entertainment, uniqueness of character and a sense of authenticity. They want to be out with the crowd.
Their parents, however, may have a differing expectation – one characterized by wellness perks and life quality. It’s generational and changing. Expectations of the business traveler are no longer centered around the suite and room service, but around the ability to choose whether to mix and go out, or to be alone and connect via digital devices.
A memorable experience is not the result of simply viewing an object on the skyline, but a reflection of the quality of the environment, the function of public spaces and the connectedness of the place to its environment. Focusing on the experience empowers architects to create iconic features and spaces that extend beyond the mere footprint of the hotel and drive memorable connections with the property.
Contributed by Gordon Beckman, AIA, principal and design director at John Portman & Associates