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Hotel for Inhabitants
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RIBA Presidents Medal Nominee
The University of Melbourne
Advanced Design Studio C: Final Thesis
Tutor: Dennis Prior
`Live for the future, Long for the past´
Hotel For Inhabitants of ‘2046’
“Everyone who goes to 2046 has the same intention, they want to recapture lost memories”
Chow Mo Wan from the film 2046 (directed by Wong Kar Wai)
This design proposal, an architectural response to Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, exists in suspended time, belonging neither to the past nor the future. Buried in the historic fabric of The Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, the architecture expresses the alienation of its ‘lost’ inhabitants by literally disappearing from the surrounding physical context.
Inverting the logic of the traditional hotel, the corridor becomes destination rather than circulation space, the journey towards restoring memories the ultimate goal of the inhabitants. Circulation and movement are absorbed into a linear programmatic space, where the actions and behavioural habits of the occupants create a film like sequence of continuous memory. No longer interiorised, the corridor becomes architectural form as it weaves throughout the mansions at times perforating the existing structure, the fenestration carefully detailed to manipulate one’s view of the past.
Conceived as a response to the broader themes of the studio this project began by defining nostalgia as a condition of longing for something unattainable. As the world around us is rapidly changing and we cling to our memories of an idealised past, we risk becoming trapped in an attempt to recapture our memories.
No one has ever returned from 2046.
Tommy Joo, 2008
“Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn’t want to share?
They’d climb a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in it, whisper the secret into the hole and cover it up with mud.
That way, nobody else would ever learn the secret...”
“You want to create a place in the world where what we think is nice, we can keep it that way. It’s like the Hong Kong that we picture in our films is something from our impressions, from our memories, a certain wonderful moment of our city.”
Wong Kar-Wai
Take care. Maybe one day you'll escape your past. If you do, look for me.
And this comes from my own understanding of the past as nostalgia,
where the definition is longing for something unattainable.
“I believe that the more things change,
the more we stay the same.”
And this is the universal truth of our life that we long to fix what has become unfixable.
In the film it says, everyone who goes to 2046 has same intention to recapture their memories,
but we don’t know if they did, because nobody has come back. Like how we will come to this hotel of inhabitants, thinking we could restore our past, but we will soon realise this is unattainable.
Tommy Joo
