ancient cities

Hotel, Motel
This contemporary hotel in Beijing, China, offers a taste of Eastern decor along with the basic comforts that Westerners seek when
traveling far from home.
Source: Blake Buyan.
While big-city hotels became key institutions
within central cities, the rapid expansion of road
networks in the first decades of the twentieth century
brought a new architectural form to the fore.
The motel was an important aspect not just of the
city but also of the development of nation-states
into an urbanized system of communications and
markets. Motels were emblematic of a major tension
within American cultural life: Main Street
versus Wall Street. As described in Jakle et al.’s
The Motel in America, motels were an early
embodiment of popular American culture as seen
in the “mom and pop” form of hands-on, independent
motel management, where families converted
their roadside properties into spartan lodgings (an
important economic activity during the Depression).
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By the early 1950s, these were being increasingly
challenged by the corporate power of chains
such as Holiday Inn or Days Inn, which emerged
as harbingers of standardized, homogenized
landscapes based around franchise models. They
signified modular construction and a minimum of
decoration and the standardized, bulk purchasing
and supply of towels, toilet rolls, and soap; they
usually guaranteed the guest a television, serviceable
bed, and modern plumbing. Motels have
continued to play important roles in automobile-
centered economies, yet are examples of the cultural
homogenization of American landscapes.
So, motels and hotels have always existed for
a very functional reason: to meet the leisure or
business demands of travelers. This can be as