VitrA Çağdaş Mimarlık Dizisi - Arkitera

their numbers. Accommodation facilities have been grouped as holiday camps, holiday
hotels, business hotels, spa hotels, thematic hotels, boutique hotels, design hotels, art
hotels, hip hotels, etc. according to the different understandings of design or the service
they provide. Today hotels are aiming to become destinations themselves, with
the activities they are creating, rather than merely being places to stay overnight. And
already in the 20th century, as a result of their marketing techniques and purpose of
creating a destination, hotels were becoming iconic images for postage stamps and
postcards.
It is possible to see hotels designed with modern, post-modern, eclectic, kitsch, minimalist
or maximalist architectural approaches and various “themes” in today’s tourism
world, which develops depending on stressing differences in an intense competition
environment and aims to present what is popular in a novel way. While internationalist
tendencies were once effective in hotel design, later the use of local references and
search for identity came into prominence. Rather than the decisiveness of need, emphasis
was placed on artificial identity. The identity got even ahead of the product, and
has become a part of hotel input and marketing systems. Especially after the 1980s the
basic criteria of hotel design became “creating environments for making tourists happy
and meeting their expectations” and “being liked”.
In hotels all around the world, entertainment events, various shows and demonstrations
as well as animations have come into prominence, and by combining consumption and
entertainment, consumption has been transformed into an action which gives pleasure
(Yırtıcı, 2002). The tendency in the tourism sector is shifting towards presenting different
images and dream worlds, with the investors trying to find the answer to “how can
we make people happy and make them come here again?” (Hess, 1997 p. 77) Today’s
consumers want to go far away from their daily routines and gain different experiences
on holidays. This creates a tension between popular values and settled permanent
values. However organized, stable and reliable their daily routine is, on holidays they want
eye-catching, fashionable and tailor-made lifestyles, and to gain different experiences,
be excited, take part in the lives of other people temporarily and borrow their images.
There is no doubt that the temporarily lifestyle on a holiday is much more attractive
and entertaining than routine, calm and permanent life. In this way, the new hotel design
goes beyond accommodation, encourages nomadic life by presenting interesting
designs, desired lives, different settings and stages and meets continuously changing
consumers demands (Collins, 2001). New hotel guests are neither temporary nor permanent;
they are sophisticated consumers who act, play, entertain, eat and sleep. They
want to end their holidays with a relieved soul full of excitement and a refreshed brain
The target in hotel design is providing an environment where the visitors can turn
their own fantasies and dreams into projects. The hotel is transformed into a scene, a
movie set where visitors can learn a lot about themselves and fulfill their dreams. The
French designer Philippe Starck is one of the leading representatives of this change in
the design of hotel. Since 1980s, Starck has been trying to sense the needs and desires
of the premium consumers of the information age and has been doing this within a rising
fashion virtuosity (Riewoldt, 2002, s. 7-11). Besides Starck, many designers like Andree
Putman, Christian Liaigre, Rafael Vinoly, David Chipperfield, David Rockwell, Richard
Meier, Jean Nouvel are among the pioneers of new hotel design; their designs have
become prized destinations in a short time and are imitated by many others.
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