Prevailing social conditions have pushed us into the deepest recesses of architecture’s inside, simultaneously broadcasting these intimate spaces on screens ad infinitum via the cloud. Our acute habitation of the interior, paradoxically, disconnects us from the physical environment.

The American motel exemplifies this reciprocity, where illicit activity “is at once sheltered and hidden, kept apart without however being left in the open” (Foucault 1986). The midcentury motel sought visual distinction in groovy atmospheres that absorbed furnishings and architecture with blankets of shaggy carpeting and luscious cascading textiles, all of which glisten with the waxy luster of polyurethane. The double entendre is not lost on these vivid and highly coordinated displays where, indeed, the carpet matches the drapes.

Today, wireless internet, flat-screen TVs, and minibar fridges have become the motel’s primary amenities, where stylized interiors have been relegated to social media feeds. Both material and technological episodes emphasize the motel as an artificial construction. This project returns these interiors to an altered object status with the assistance of image-based neural networks and 3D texture mapping. The ancillary aesthetic characteristics of the motel room present an alternative material artifice for architecture to recuperate lost intimacy with the material realm.

2021
Exhibited in A+D Virtual Exhibition | “One Object at a Time”
with Jean Jaminet, Jonathan Bonezzi, Ryan Lane  


https://www.aplusd.oneobject.org