The Hotel is a collective project that studies the hotel, both as a building type and as a place of hospitality, through a collection of fourteen individual contributions inside one skyscraper. The project imagines hospitality as a realm of exchange that condenses the diversity of the city through an assortment of guests, staff, and the broader public.
The hotel is a function of temporality and hospitality. The study questions the requirements for an architecture of hospitality to welcome, host, and entertain. As an architecture of temporality—an architecture that is dynamic and ever-changing, embodying a sense of transience and constant activity—the hotel allows for experimentation, while anticipating adaptation to meet the changing demands of its temporary residents. The hotel, as type, is understood beyond its curated front. It is, instead, a place of anonymity and exchange, of served and serving, a place characterized by short stays in a lasting structure.
The skyscraper, as a formal and monumental object, appears to contrast the hotel’s temporality. In its autonomy, the skyscraper is a landmark in the skyline. Located in Midtown Manhattan—on the former site of Hotel Pennsylvania and adjacent to Penn Station—this project is a reflection on the metropolis of New York City.
The Hotel consists of the design of the skyscraper as landmark—The Metropolitan—and the hotel as tenant—One Hotel.
The Site and Type
The lot on Seventh Avenue between Thirty-Second and Thirty-Third Streets in New York City sits vacant. This is the former home of Hotel Pennsylvania, built in 1919 by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to generate revenue and compete with the New York Central Railroad, which was designing Commodore Hotel to attract business travelers passing through Grand Central Terminal.
Hotel Pennsylvania was designed by the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White. Consisting of 2,200 guest rooms over twenty-two floors, it was the largest hotel in the world at the time. Facing Seventh Avenue—and Pennsylvania Station—a portico greeted guests and led into the building through a sequence of spaces culminating in the hotel’s lobby.
Pennsylvania Station itself had been completed nine years before, in 1910, by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and also designed by McKim, Mead & White. The rail company had first hoped for a hotel atop the station but they were eventually convinced otherwise. A Beaux-Arts masterpiece, the monumental station was built of ornate granite and marble surrounding a modern steel concourse. A large atrium with glass ceilings, along with glass-block walkways, brought light through the overlapping tracks to the lowest platform.
The downturn of Pennsylvania Station began during World War II. Because it was a travel hub for many troops, its glass roof was painted to prevent the station from radiating like a beacon. Soon after the war, the interstate highway system transformed commuter travel, and New York City was busy building highways and bridges into Manhattan. In 1963, Pennsylvania Station was dark, hot, and dirty. With the decline of train commuter travel, a struggling Pennsylvania Railroad Company sold the station’s air-rights to Madison Square Garden. The station would remain, but this time completely buried underground. Efforts to save the building failed, and after three years of demolition—and, throughout all this, uninterrupted train travel—the original Pennsylvania Station had finally been demolished.
Renovation after renovation, the renamed “Penn Station,” which remains crushed by Madison Square Garden above, has yet to regain its former appeal. Despite this, it is the connection point for Amtrak regional trains, New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad, and the New York City subway. And every day, 650,000 people travel through Penn Station, making it the busiest rail hub in North America. Plans are underway to renovate Penn Station, but the extent of the renovations proposed changes with each governor.
Today, New York City faces an average real estate price of $15,000—or €14,000—per square meter. The more these prices rise, the more the city has expanded its boundaries, leading to extended commute times for residents and workers. In this context, many corporate entities are willing to pay for proximity to transportation hubs. Large companies are prioritizing employee happiness with easy commuting and a plethora of amenities.
The trends in commercial real estate have spurred redevelopment near Penn Station. Over the last few decades, Vornado Realty Trust has slowly acquired surrounding properties. Currently, they own 930,000 square meters, and they have plans to expand to 1.4 million. With leases averaging fifteen years, these amenity-intense office properties are a low-risk investment, as long as there are anchor tenants. Branding their new acquisitions as The Penn District, Vornado has already attracted Meta, Apple, and Amazon—among others.
Following real estate interests, the largest building planned in the Penn District is Penn 15—and it is designed according to every wish of these big companies. For financial stability and in order to attract other tenants, Vornado is searching for an anchor tenant to lease a minimum of 125,000 square meters. If built as planned, Penn 15 will rise sixty-eight stories, a total of 365 meters. Replacing Hotel Pennsylvania, it would contain 250,000 square meters of rentable office space.
This project, The Hotel, proposes an alternative use of the site—hospitality.
An architecture of hospitality is generous to the people inside. It welcomes and it hosts. With One Hotel, space becomes a service that both responds to immediate demand and anticipates change.
At the time of Hotel Pennsylvania’s completion, New York City’s population surpassed five-and-a-half million people, six times the population just fifty years before. New York City was, at the time, the epicenter for immigration into the United States, especially from Europe. And since then, various demographic groups have been introduced into the city’s history, contributing to its diverse and dynamic tapestry. On top of this, as an economic and cultural center, New York hosts travelers for business and pleasure, welcoming many, along with their money.
The beginning of the hotel as a building type dates to the late eighteenth century in the United States, and it was, then, also market-driven. As a result of trade and commerce, the movement of goods led to a movement of people, and the need for food and temporary accommodations followed. New, and better, modes of transportation boomed, leading to urban expansion and further demand for lodging. In the early nineteenth century, hotels became a prominent place for public gatherings and served as connections between local communities and broader society.
In the first half of the twentieth century, hotels became the epitome of modernity—centers of mobility, temporality, and anonymity. With the increasing ease of traveling, hotel types expanded to meet the needs of new customers. Hotels become hosts that to the present continue to welcome, entertain, feed, house, and introduce guests to an unfamiliar place.
As temporary accommodations, all hotels function according to the same fundamental principles. Each is composed of accommodations, amenities, systems, and services—the ratios and specifics of which respond to the hotel type and guest they serve. In each instance, guests are welcomed, guided to the entrance, and greeted at reception or check-in kiosk, receiving keys for access. After guests check in, they navigate to their accommodations and use a variety of amenities during their stay. A hotel’s services and systems operate to guarantee a pleasant guest experience.
Hotels have evolved to meet varying guest needs. Optimized, cost-effective accommodation ratios were found both in the Jane Hotel’s double-loaded corridor and in Hotel Pennsylvania’s fork-shaped plan. Marriot Marquis reimagined amenity-floor relationships with a grand atrium. Simultaneously, residential hotels—such as the Hotel Chelsea—thrived due to a building code loophole that categorized temporary accommodations based on access to a kitchen, rather than duration of stay. In recent years, hotel types have expanded again to include guests previously pushed elsewhere. Rooms rented by the hour accommodate non-standard schedules, while migrants have filled hotels in New York City.
All of this history, and all of these demographic and social factors, have combined to create a context ripe for change. Hospitality in New York City is experiencing a moment of redefinition. As New York City attracts an increasingly diverse array of visitors, it stands as a global metropolis that must adapt and cater to this varied clientele through its service industry.
One Hotel asks: what can a new hospitality offer?
The Collective Project
The project proposes a skyscraper, The Metropolitan, in the heart of the Penn District. The Metropolitan is imagined to be owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. After winning a bid for a new casino in New York City, the Port Authority would realize the building and turn an architecture of hospitality into a landmark. Through the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Port Authority would maintain the building’s public spaces, which include the ground floor, sky lobbies, and cloud lobby. The casino would also be owned by the Port Authority and serve as a financial foundation for the project. One Hotel would be the first tenant, leasing all accommodation, service, and system floors, as well as spaces within public floors.
One Hotel is a single operational entity comprised of fourteen hotel segments. To manage such a large and diverse hotel, One Hotel has partnered with fourteen hotel operators. Each segment is derived from a specific hotel type, serving a specific guest.
The collection of segments includes:
A casino where gamblers are dealt a good time.
A boarding house that refreshes enlisted sailors.
A day hotel where lovers cross paths and share fleeting intimacies.
Capsules that treat cheapskates with a good deal.
A chain hotel that entices business travelers to extend their journey.
A family hotel that all members of the nuclear family can enjoy.
A homeless hotel that invests in children’s better future.
A migrant hotel that shelters those on long-term relocation.
A residential hotel that is (almost) home to precariats on the move.
A love hotel where sex workers and customers can be intimate in a safe environment.
A wellness spa that blends sensory treatment with water-enhanced tranquility.
A resort that indulges vacationers in a manicured paradise.
A single women’s hotel that supports women to live freely and confidently.
A boutique hotel that elevates aspirants’ real life and online presence.
One Hotel has 2,497 keys. The division of keys is derived from analysis of each hotel type, the market for each hotel type in New York City, an understanding of guest demographics, and the number of keys needed to financially support private amenities. With a high regard for the hotel’s staff, One Hotel offers 180 keys for staff who may have trouble finding reasonable accommodation in a city with lofty housing costs.
The building absorbs flows of people from all sides. It welcomes a diverse group of travelers, the public, and staff, providing them with a range of public spaces, from the ground floor through sky lobbies and up to the Cloud Lobby overlooking the city. And peopled by thousands of commuters, employees in the Penn District, residents of the area, and wandering sightseers, as well as a diverse range of hotel guests, this vertical city stages encounters that extend hospitality beyond the confines of the building.
The front door of the building opens to the Penn District. With setbacks of 7.5 meters from Seventh Avenue, another 3 meters from Thirty-Second and Thirty-Third Streets, the building rises 356 meters.
The fourteen segments are arranged in clusters in the building. The first cluster has hotel accommodations and amenities intimately connected to the life of the city. The hotel types of the second cluster are associated with longer-stay accommodations and amenities. The accommodations in the third cluster are more private in nature. They are still connected to the city, but this connection occurs through views, rather than through the public invitation at the base of the building.
Three sky lobbies sit below each cluster. They hold the reception for the respective segments and public and semi-public amenities, and are a point of transition from express to local elevators. Similar to the sky lobbies, a cloud lobby sits atop the tower. While the local elevators move floor to floor, express elevators move quickly between the ground floor, sky lobbies, cloud lobby, and respective service floors. Guest elevators are arranged in the two larger cores, with dedicated service elevators in the four corners. Glass express elevators reflect the movement of the subway.
Serving as a public pathway, each one accommodates up to fifty people and halts at every sky lobby. These routes guide guests and visitors through sections of the building, offering glimpses of the encounters within. Dedicated for public use, the public sky lobbies accompany the cloud lobby and ground floor. Service and system floors are also divided by cluster. Additional systems and services occupy two basement levels.
The Metropolitan
As a landmark, the Metropolitan will outlast the program of One Hotel. In its autonomy, it is designed as a skyscraper that can accommodate a variety of residential uses.
Many skyscrapers have big open-plan spaces for office use—as a result they are hard to transform to other uses and are thus bound to their program. This is the case of Penn 15. Although it has a peripheral core to allow more sunlight from the south, its deep floor plate makes it an inefficient model for residential and hotel use, which both need direct access to sunlight and outside air. When a hotel is incorporated in a typical skyscraper, it is often located on the top of the tower, with a smaller core and footprint. In the case of KK100 in Shanghai, for example, a central atrium brings in light and air.
By contrast, a slit atrium anchors the Metropolitan, giving the building its monumental form, bringing light into its depth, and revealing the building’s inner workings. Along its east-west axis, the building opens to Seventh Avenue and the Penn District, and to the Empire State Building, which sits just to the north. In order to meet setback requirements, and allow more daylight into the tower, the southern portion of the tower ends before the northern does.
The internal and external grid increments of the building support current hotel segments and future uses that will go beyond the lifespan of One Hotel.
As a permanent feature, the building’s core is positioned a maximum distance of 10.5 meters from the outer edge of the facade. This is the sum of a 9.5-meter corridor and a 9-meter room depth for adequate daylight and a variety of residential uses. The structural and facade grids adopt a 1.2-meter increment, which is derived from the dimensions of common bed types—the length of a full, queen, and king size beds. This 1.2-meter increment allows various room widths to accommodate the length of one bed, furniture, and space to move in rooms with a 4.8-meter width. The structural grid—at 9.6 meters—also falls on this 1.2-meter increment. This variation accommodates the current fourteen segments of One Hotel, any future variation in hotels, and the possibility of conversion to apartments.
Lateral loads, rather than gravitational loads, drive the design of a skyscraper. As building heights grow, lateral loads grow exponentially. The core’s structure in a skyscraper takes most of this lateral load, which is often the space for elevators and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Central core structures often occupy a minimum of 25 percent of the total floor area, compromising the total rentable area.
The Metropolitan’s core is divided symmetrically, in a way similar to the plan of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Building in Hong Kong. As part of the structural system, symmetrical cores and trusses increase structural efficiency, thus reducing core sizes. The cores are divided further into three smaller cores along the length of the building, leaving adaptable open spaces and allowing for differing programmatic arrangements. In the case of One Hotel, some accommodations occupy the entire floor, while others are split along the north-south or east-west axes.
The lateral load is absorbed by an outrigger truss system that stiffens the building. As seen in the elevation of KK100, the structural members connect the core to the perimeter columns. Where the outrigger trusses are located, big open spaces with long spans become possible, which is desirable for public amenities. The decentralized cores ensure flexibility in elevator use.
Considering the lifespan of the building and the temporality of the program, the facade has two parts. The Metropolitan’s primary facade relates the building to its autonomy: bound by structure and exterior shape, it is derived from an internal formal logic expressed outwardly in the city’s skyline. The primary facade is comprised of a unitized system made of prefabricated units with glass and concrete panels. On this scale of construction, such a system is safer, cheaper, and quicker. The secondary facade allows for adaptation: it is comprised of an aluminum stick system that can be mounted and dismounted from the inside of the structure. Hence, it can respond to climatic and programmatic conditions, allowing for variation between the hotels and flexibility in the building’s future.
Following the skyscraper’s traditional tripartite division—base, body, and crown— the building’s massive scale is made graspable through the articulation of the bays that widen moving upward. The base is experienced mainly from the streets. The colonnade on the ground floor shelters and draws people into the building. Through gradual transitions, the facade in the body opens near the trusses. The slit atrium’s facade has a wider, repetitive grid to differentiate it from the densely stacked floors on either side. Here, the facade reveals the diagonal trusses in the building’s interior. The building’s crown is the furthest removed from the urban fabric and only experienced from a distance. It is distinguished by halving the lintels to span two floors instead of one. The timeless—yet interchangeable—facade makes it notable in its urban context.
One Hotel
As a temporary but, indeed, originary guest in its building, One Hotel is organized by the structural and facade grids. A matrix of room types captures the similarities and differences among, and within, each of the fourteen hotel types and staff accommodations. Overall dimensions of the room, both length and width, supply the first round of division. Again, this follows an increment of 1.2 meters and a maximum depth of 9 meters, with eleven room sizes in total. As a first round of variation, some segments have a balcony or loggia as part of the guest room. The location of plumbing and ventilation adds a final layer of variation to create various room models. This matrix of rooms documents the overlap of room sizes, different room models, and their uses, as well as the layout of the facade as it corresponds to each room. It captures the possibility of sharing accommodations between hotel types, either in the short term—on a day-to-day basis—or long-term, which may require more adaptation.
Each segment produces different quantities of soiled laundry, waste, elevator use, and associated staff. For example, a more luxurious short stay in the Wellness and Spa segment produces double the soiled laundry per day of a long-term stay in the Homeless segment. These calculations inform the requirements of One Hotel’s services and segments. The hotel-to-hotel variation is organized in the service and system floors. Like the hotel’s guests, laundry, garbage, food, luggage, and deliveries travel through the building on express and local elevators.
The operations of the One Hotel accommodate different rhythms of serving spaces through the choreographed movement of workers, linen, food, and garbage. Centralized and decentralized systems work together to optimize the use of infrastructure and labor. For example, the linens used on the sixty-second floor are collected in the basement of the hotel around four in the morning, along with other linens needed for the hotel’s cluster. These linens travel to the third sky lobby via express elevator, where they are further sorted in linen storage. During the afternoon housekeeping shifts, linens travel to the sixty-second floor in a local service elevator. In their place, soiled linens are collected, gathered in the third sky lobby, and finally returned to the basement at the end of the day to be cleaned, folded, and returned for the same journey over again.
One Hotel’s services are efficiently organized. Laundry and waste management gathered for each cluster operate seamlessly with those in the basement. Kitchens are equipped with dumbwaiters for streamlined service to restaurants located on the sky lobby above. Staff facilities, including areas for uniforms, break rooms, and sleeping pods, are distributed across each service floor. Meanwhile, the administrative hub of the tower is centralized on the second floor. The third service floor includes an employee dining room. Those working on these floors can enjoy the daylight and views also offered to the hotel’s guests.
Staff accommodation is located between the fiftieth and fifty-second floors. With 160 keys in total, three room types serve the short- and long-term needs of staff. These room types also accommodate multi-person bunk rooms, individual apartments, and family living. There are also amenities for staff, such as self-service laundry, kitchens, a cinema, and a badminton court.
System floors are responsible for the operation of the cluster’s infrastructure, including mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, security and surveillance, as well as fire safety control systems. As is necessary in supertall buildings, refuge areas allow people to evacuate safely in case of fire and wait for rescue, in the case of smoke or damage to an emergency egress route.
The ground floor is a continuation of the street, collecting visitors through entrances on its north, south, and west sides. The building also reopens a direct route to the subway at Penn Station. As the main entrance of the hotel, the ground floor welcomes both public and the variety of guests, with their differing entry experiences. A luggage drop-off service is available for guests and the public. For some segments, this luggage will be delivered directly to a guest’s room. The ground floor offers services to the city such as a post office, bank, and language center.
Accordingly, amenities, both public and semi-public, are shared across One Hotel. Many times, they are oriented toward adjacent segments, while hosting programs from other clusters.
The first sky lobby is at the top of the skyscraper’s base. This is the reception for the Sailor’s Boarding House, and the Chain and Day segments. Extending from the public street level, guests will find a twenty-four-hour terrain of consumption, encounter, and entertainment, filled with specialty restaurants, an event hall, bar, art gallery, and shops available to both the hotel’s guests and the public.
Twenty stories above, the second sky lobby is the reception for the Family, Homeless, Migrant, Residential, and Love segments. Pathways connect people to the shops, markets, activity, leisure, and work that fuel longer-term living.
Rising another twenty floors, the third sky lobby is the reception for the Resort, Wellness Spa, Single Women’s, and Boutique segments. The central lobby opens the intimacy of a garden, contrasted against the vastness of the New York City skyline. It has programs that supply and care for, feed, relax, and energize their guests. A semi-public spa overlooks the garden from above.
On the highest floors of the building, the cloud lobby blurs the internal structure and systems of the skyscraper with its peripheral view of New York City’s skyline. Accessible to the public during the day, it remains open for the hotel’s guests all night long.
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As the first tenant in the Metropolitan, One Hotel sets the standard for an architecture of hospitality and exchange. One Hotel embraces the transience characteristic of hotels, offering hospitality as a transitional experience that welcomes and bids farewell to its guests.
One Hotel may shift and change in response to changing demographics. A successful hotel segment may take over another. The hotel segments could move from thirteen, to eight, or twenty-three. As the program shifts, the facade’s secondary elements will come and go. As will temporary walls and plumbing. Public spaces will host new tenants. Apartments could fill the floors once held by One Hotel. Regardless of the fluctuation inside, the Metropolitan will remain a landmark in the skyline of New York City.
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Propositions
1. The Hotel embraces the frenetic energy of New York City while opposing its outward expansion.
2. The Metropolitan will outlast One Hotel.
3. One Hotel accommodates fourteen types of guests, and its staff.
4. One Hotel shares accommodation, amenities, systems, and services with a 24/7 cycle.
5. The Hotel sets a standard for an architecture of hospitality.
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