Accor Hotels
International competition for Accor: identity and community as programme, not decoration.
- Status
- Project
- Type
- Hotel — international competition
- Location
- São Paulo
- Country
- Brasil
- Area
- 6.500 m²
- Year
- 2018
- Team
- Arch. Fernando Hitzig
Arch. Leonardo Militello
International competition for Accor: identity and community as programme, not decoration.
It is impossible to ignore that hotels today base their entire offer on themed aesthetics and social activities for the enjoyment of their guests, and that this is an undeniable advantage over temporary spaces such as Airbnb. So why is Airbnb a threat to the hotel business? And why do most hotels build their offer around themes and storytelling? Today Airbnb feels like being at home. Hotels, by contrast, are places of transit: despite the renewed thematic offer, they all dress and undress according to fashion, without a clear identity. That explains a lack of IDENTITY.
Our proposal comes down to two words, IDENTITY & COMMUNITY, both resolved as part of how the hotel runs and entertains. Identity is an integration of the concepts that define a person or a thing — but the hotel should not have a fixed identity; it should serve as a container. A large skeleton that each guest can fill with their own belongings, just as they do at home. A true tailored offer.
The composition has to be consistent with a system that gives it unity. We do not conceive interior architecture as a sum of individual elements — decorative objects, furniture, lighting. Our proposal is defined by a broad family of pieces that together constitute a space in itself. That allows for many possible configurations, whether in new hotels or in existing ones being refurbished.
Assembled together, these pieces form a living organism, versatile and adaptable to each of the hotel’s key spaces, shaping and organising everything from the lighting to the fixed and movable furniture. Beyond its organising role it carries a symbolic one: to hold, inside its vintage suitcases, the personal belongings of every traveller passing through. The stamps on those suitcases, evidence of journeys across states and provinces, become part of the local identity and are carried over into a wallpaper. In the visual communication we stress the collective local identity of the city’s people through a large videowall at the front desk. We also propose an active presence of the most representative local flora (ECO CONCEIVED). All of it gathered into a single binding construction system.
It is a void, and as such defined by a pure, simple aesthetic. Free of any imposed prettiness, though its lines undoubtedly build a world tied to that modernity which stripped away eclecticism and ornament — the status of the contemporary individual. That stripping away is what we now call minimalism: living with the minimum and the necessary. Something genuinely timeless. The minimum invites reflection, because it asks us to conceive life around measured, basic, sustainable consumption.
All photos
