In the book series ‘Object Lessons’ Walsh addresses the subject of hotels and how our desires are situated in a replica of a home. She explores the difference between a hotel and a domestic space examining the rules of being a guest in a space we pay so much to inhabit. What interested me most about the essay was the idea of replica and how the hotel is a space which replicates our home but allows us to play out our fanaticise and experience ourselves differently. We go to a 5 star hotel with the intension to live a life better than our one at home, we romanticise a version of ourselves in the new space we inhabit. The hotel represents a break from our lives and ourselves, yet we desire to come home, we feel good to be back in our homes with the comforts of our lives. This is because the hotel is a fraud, it is a disguise from ourselves, it shows us a life of luxury but it is really a representation of what we cannot achieve. It is a catalyst of capitalism, we are told to work so we can have breaks away experience a life that is unattainable. Yet we have a desire to leave, to break away from our fabricated existence in a place with has the properties of a home but in many ways is polar opposite to it.
Walsh, J. (2015) Hotel. London. Bloomsbury
Marwick, A. Walsh, J. (2015) Hotel. London. Bloomsbury
Goldsmiths Design 