Latin American Hotels: Visions of Modernity, Spaces of Negotiation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The iconic Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico was revolutionary in its design when completed in 1949, serving as a prototype for future Hilton endeavors and modern hotels around the globe. Paying homage to the site hosting this year’s LASA congress, this panel aims to critically examine the modern hotel as an exclusionary site of Inter-American and foreign relations as well as design expressing Latin American modernity. Through different models, methodologies, and hotel sites across the Americas, this panel engages with social interaction and visuality to recuperate the importance of the modern Latin American hotel.

Sub Track

• Art and Architecture

Chairs

• Fredo Rivera, Duke University

• Erica N Morawski, Kendall College of Art and Design

Individual Presentations

• Towering Tropicality: Liberating the Habana Hilton - Fredo Rivera, Duke University

• Ice Rink in the Tropics: Hotel Humboldt and Venezuela’s Modernist Landscape - Sean Nesselrode, New York University

• From Grand Hotel to Thermal Refuge; the construction of Chile as a tourist destination - María Macarena Cortés Darrigrande, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

• Unstable Spaces: Hotel Design, Tourism Policy, and the Ideology of the Revolution in post-1959 Cuba - Erica N Morawski, Kendall College of Art and Design

Discussant

• JeanFrancois M Lejeune, University of Miami School of Architecture