This chapter will introduce theories by three eminent social critics of modernism, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, and, a generation younger, Siegfried Kracauer. Their combined theories about the impact that money and wealth have on social structures and behavioral codes will provide the conceptual framework for our understanding of the hotel as a prime representative of modern inhabited space, as a metaphor as well as a breeding ground for modern life and its corresponding Zeitgeist. Viewed through this lens, the hotel, no matter where it is, appears as an intrinsically modern, urban setting in which human relations are conditioned by their formal organization in space and time. For as different as the above-mentioned sociologists' particular agendas are, they all see form as key in modern social interaction. The ambivalent nature of the hotel as neither completely public nor completely private effectively reinforces and demands organized interaction in the guise of social codes and etiquette.

Furthermore, as the boundaries between private and public become blurry in hotels, as we have seen, some of modernism's key forces, as identified by Simmel and his colleagues, can invade exactly those spaces whose declared purpose it is to grant a break from the unnerving and disquieting effects of the new busy life. If hotels advertise with the slogan that they provide a “home away from home” and thus exploit a whole set of ideologically important associations with privacy, intimacy, and the bourgeoisie's “safe haven,” they ultimately reveal the impossibility of preserving those safe spaces in modern times.