RESEARCH
Hotel lobbies and Midtown’s distended public space
2024︎︎︎present

I’m currently developing a project on the architecture of hotel lobbies built in Midtown Manhattan between the 1960s and 80s. This project takes seriously Thomas Gieryn’s proposal that buildings stabilize social life but do so “imperfectly.” I approach the lobbies of the Marriott Marquis and the New York Hilton at Rockefeller Center as formal attempts to destabilize the continuum between street and bar that, according to George Chauncey, facilitated commercialized sex along 42nd Street and throughout the Theater District in the 20th century. Drawing on planning materials of the late 1960s through early 1990s, I suggest that urban buildings’ inability to resolve the contradictions of urban life offers a replenishing source of urban crises to be managed by a professionalizing class of city administrators. In this regard, I depart from Gieryn’s original assumption to suggest that, while buildings’ incompleteness opens up a space for transgression it also creates new sites for state power and surveillance.