It is time to check into the hotel. Ideally, we will land in a place where architecture, objects, and people effectively work together to make sure that the total hotel environment enchants the guest from the moment he or she thinks about setting foot in this place. They provide the setting and backdrop for personal encounters, and they structure lives, movement, and time in the hotel's halls and rooms. When we approach a hotel, we know what to expect because we know the requisites of this setting. If we were to find an element changed or missing, we would have to readjust, even if we had never been to that particular place before. If spaces “take place in narratives,” the hotel is a complex one, consisting of various sub-narratives that make up a spatial skeleton before any guest has even appeared on the scene. In this light, every new hotel guest simply checks in to participate in a preexisting story that will acquire his or her own personal note but will continue long after the guest has left the hotel. As the poet Raoul Schrott writes in his Hotels: “Obviously, names are interchangeable, as are said love-affairs, as long as the location remains the same, this decorum for staging a sentimentality whose tone alone makes it tolerable.”

The Entrance

Part of the street life, part of the hotel's universe, the entrance is designed to lure people inside.