Hotel Croydon

For Alberti, painting is an open window to the world

No matter where on earth you are, or how far you go

There's that world behind the window

As the memory of Croydon flows in, the civic heart of the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.

it is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours, of sensations, -  a fine dust of atoms[1]

At once surreal and banal, they host trade and diplomacy, commerce, civic encounters, frictions and contradictions

A hotel is an apparition of sorts

A hotel is the script to the story, the canvas to the painting

The next morning, before embarking on another journey,

the hut unknots, it de-constructs, disappears, and becomes a virtually indistinguishable

part of the larger canvas once again in Croydon

At this confluence of narratives, the hotel generates random but fortuitous collisions

between human beings who would never have met elsewhere.[2]

The moment an object appears, it is charged with a special force

like a pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships[3]

Saving time is a good thing because the more time we save, the more we can afford to lose

This is a world made to be lost[4]

A hotel offers

a neutral background of routine to give every incident a dramatic relief.[5]

a fertile cross-section through the transient population

a field for the comedy of clashing manners,

Call it an anchor, a perpetual traveller

A refuge for who wants to withdraw from the daily commotion

A place where time stand still

A gap to the outside, through which we can escape the here and now.

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[1] Italo Calvino - Six Memos for the Next Millennium

[2] Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York

[3] Italo Calvino - Six Memos for the Next Millennium

[4] William Morris – The Earthly Paradise

[5] Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York

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Location

Status

Tutors

Reference

Croydon, London

Academia 

Miraj Ahmed, Martin Jameson

Caravanserais

Rowton Houses

Exodus

Supersurface

Hotel Sphinx