Room with a View

A Hotel Experience for the Adventurous
Beverly Hills, CA
UCLA, Spring 2014
Critic: Andrew Kovacs

This project fundamentally reinterprets the experience of the hotel and provides new opportunities for unusual interactions between guests. Sited on a narrow strip of land between the Beverly Hilton and the Peninsula Hotel, this clustered conglomerate of individual hotel rooms offers a fresh take on hotel living.

By exploding the typical hotel plan into 200 distinct floating units, the sensation of private luxury is partnered with a heightened sense of observational community amongst hotel visitors. Each room provides a unique experience: depending on the materiality, views, and interior organization of a unit, a visitor can choose to be the viewer or the viewed, the hermit or the exhibitionist.

This cluster of rooms becomes a social equalizer, for no penthouse exists. The material of each facade ranges from reflective metal and mirrored glass to matte white metal and transparent glass. In this dense visual maze of shadow and reflectivity, guests are always peripherally aware of each other and no unit is better or worse than another.

At ground level, an elongated pool and a commercial retail center provide a common base from which visitors can look upward to admire the tree-like structure above.  Regardless of one's position within the hotel, the notion of surveillance is always at play.