PSYCHOPODIA: LIMBS OF THE SOUL
a Manhattan hotel

date: 1998

This project deals in part with a concern with the quantity, processing and display of information in contemporary cities. One area of interest is in the design of devices, architectural or technological, which convert data too numerous, too confusing, or too large into something which can be directly experienced. Beginning with the premise that the contemporary city has moved beyond the range of intuitive understanding in sheer size, this hotel is an architectural filter for the translation of scale and sensory experience.

The building is a medium through which one orients oneself in the city, each space filtering an experience of the site in a specific way. Public areas of the building, in the interior of the block, combine a specific, non-visual, sensory experience with a framed view of part of the city brought into the composition of the space, while two-way communication between city and hotel is provided on the outer surface of the bedrooms.

The beds fold out at night, signaling activity to the street.

Here the beds, which are constructed as a skin of movable panels, slide outward and cause the exterior surface to bulge over the street. At night the blank facade becomes a billboard of the activity within, translated and shifted to the scale of the city. Unlike a conventional billboard, which only increases city noise, this filter displays only one very specific aspect of this activity - that the people in the rooms are in bed.

A vertical garden of moss runs through the centre of the hotel, supported by and irrigated through blocks of porous ceramic. Building services, tiolets, etc. are placed in this zone, and it acts as a buffer between the public display and private rooms.

The composition of the dining surfaces mimics that of the tables, seating and cityscape, linking plates and rooftops in a continuous plane as far as the horizon. The tables are composed of modular dining trays, which in building up and arranging allow diners to construct and reconstruct their own city over the course of a meal.