From short stays to long memory
The guest remains for a limited time.
The Work, instead, must endure.
This difference is decisive.
A resort designed for immediacy risks ageing as quickly as its image.
Architecture founded on proportion, matter, topography and necessity can instead pass through time.
The guest’s stay is brief.
The memory of place can be long.
This is where hospitality ceases to belong solely to the tourism industry.
It enters the field of architecture.
Hospitality does not mean entertainment
A growing part of contemporary hospitality constructs experiences.
It programmes emotions.
Multiplies stimuli.
Transforms every space into content.
Architecture is often reduced to a support for communication.
Ferrara begins with the opposite question:
what must happen for a person to truly inhabit a place, even if only for a few days?
Hospitality means providing measure.
Orientation.
Protection.
Intimacy.
A relationship with light.
Contact with matter.
The possibility of withdrawal.
Hospitality does not coincide with the accumulation of experiences.
It can emerge from their selection.
Commissioning a resort as an Inhabitable Work
A resort can begin as a product.
Or it can begin as a Work.
The difference does not depend upon scale.
It does not depend upon the number of rooms.
It does not depend upon hotel classification.
It depends upon the ability to transform place, programme, privacy, matter, light and time into Necessary Form.
It is under these conditions that hospitality can move beyond the consumption of experience.
A room is not a repeated unit
The room is the minimum unit of hospitality.
But it should not be treated as a serial module to which decorative variations are applied.
It is the place where the relationship with the outside becomes personal.
Where the body encounters:
light;
shadow;
matter;
view;
protection;
water;
night;
silence.
Functional repetition does not require perceptual repetition.
Even within complex hospitality systems, architecture can construct a specific relationship between each unit and the place.
Place comes before concept
A resort should not be transferable from one landscape to another without losing its meaning.
Topography.
Vegetation.
Climate.
Wind.
Water.
Orientation.
Materials.
Existing structures.
Geology.
Horizon.
These are generative conditions.
For Ferrara, place is not scenery upon which an architectural image is positioned.
It is what resists arbitrary form.
The project must listen to what exists before the building.
Only then can a form emerge that truly belongs to that territory.
The resort as an organism, not a catalogue of functions
A hospitality programme contains different systems.
Rooms.
Suites.
Common spaces.
Dining.
Wellbeing.
Water.
Services.
Routes.
Logistics.
Staff.
Building systems.
Technical areas.
Landscape.
Arrivals.
Departures.
The problem is not simply to distribute them correctly across a plan.
The problem is to make them belong to a single structure.
A true architecture of hospitality must hold together what is visible and what remains invisible.
The guest experience.
The work of the staff.
Logistics.
Maintenance.
Privacy.
The perception of place.
Complexity must not be disguised.
It must be ordered.
Architecture must not compete with the landscape
Many resorts attempt to dominate their site through a recognisable gesture.
Others attempt to disappear through a mimetic aesthetic.
Both strategies can become image.
Ferrara works instead on the relationship between presence and belonging.
Architecture can be strong without being alien.
It can be recognisable without imposing itself.
It can enter the earth.
Follow a contour.
Construct a courtyard.
Protect a view.
Open a void.
Hold water.
Form does not need to imitate the landscape.
It must discover with it a common necessity.
Building less to allow more to exist
The quality of a resort does not depend on the quantity of elements it offers.
At times, the project gains strength through subtraction.
Fewer signs.
Fewer materials.
Fewer gestures.
Less noise.
This does not mean spatial poverty.
It means concentration.
When form is freed from what is unnecessary, the place can become perceptible again.
Light acquires weight.
Matter becomes present.
The path gains intensity.
Architecture stops continually explaining itself.
It begins to act.
Matter against scenography
Matter in hospitality is often used to produce identity.
Local stone.
Wood.
Earth.
Metal.
Concrete.
But a material does not become authentic simply because it is recognisable or local.
It must belong to the construction.
It must carry weight.
Age.
Be touched.
Resist.
Change over time.
For Ferrara, the Truth of Matter prevents architecture from being reduced to a scenography of authenticity.
Matter must not describe the place.
It must participate in its structure.
Light as construction, not effect
Contemporary hospitality often uses light to create atmosphere.
Ferrara considers it instead as a constructive material.
Light orients.
Separates.
Reveals.
Protects.
Measures.
It can open a relationship with the landscape or interrupt it.
It can reveal the thickness of a wall.
Define a passage.
Transform a threshold into a spatial event.
Light is not added to form.
It participates in its birth.
Water, threshold, path
Water in a resort does not necessarily need to become an attraction.
It can be measure.
Distance.
Reflection.
Boundary.
Cooling.
Continuity.
In the same way, a path is not merely a connection between functions.
Arrival.
Threshold.
Descent.
A courtyard.
A narrow passage.
A sudden opening towards the landscape.
These are instruments through which architecture constructs perception.
The guest does not receive the entire image at once.
The guest progressively enters the Work.
Common space without spectacle
Common spaces are often designed as places of representation.
Lobbies.
Lounges.
Restaurants.
Pools.
Terraces.
Their strength, however, does not need to depend upon spectacle.
A common space can become memorable through:
proportion;
matter;
void;
gravity;
light;
relationship with the landscape.
Architecture does not have to continually demonstrate that it is exceptional.
It must construct a condition in which the guest can perceive something that does not exist elsewhere in the same way.
Privacy as the construction of space
In high-level hospitality, privacy is often treated as the physical distance between one room and another.
But geometric distance is not enough.
Privacy is a spatial construction.
It depends on:
orientation;
the sequence of access;
depth;
thresholds;
changes of level;
vegetation;
light;
views;
walls;
courtyards;
the presence or absence of others.
A place can be open to the landscape while remaining profoundly protected.
Privacy does not require isolation.
It requires the measure of relationship.
The E9 Grid: experience against image
The E9 Grid allows two profoundly different conditions to be distinguished.
A resort can be efficient.
Photogenic.
Expensive.
Highly communicated.
Perfectly functional.
And still remain surface.
Or it can possess a necessary relationship between place, matter, structure, use and form.
The difference does not belong to style.
It belongs to criterion.
Work or Built Object.
Place or Surface.
Necessary Form or Image.
The E9 Grid is not intended to make a resort more recognisable.
It is used to verify whether architecture actually exists.
An author, not a supplier of style
Commissioning a resort from Fausto Ferrara does not mean selecting a formal language.
It does not mean purchasing an aesthetic.
It does not mean applying a recognisable image to a hospitality programme.
The project arises from the specific place, programme and commission.
Every site presents different conditions.
Every programme requires a new structure.
Every Work must find its own form.
For this reason, Ferrara does not work through the replication of a format.
He works where the conditions exist for a Work to be built.
Commission, investment and responsibility
A resort is also an investment.
It must work.
It must be buildable.
It must respond to time, cost, regulatory processes and operational requirements.
Authorship does not eliminate these problems.
It assumes them.
The project must hold together the value of the Work and the reality of the investment.
This requires a patron capable of understanding that architecture is not the final cladding of a business plan.
It can be one of the elements that determine its value over time.
Author and executive structure
Authorial responsibility belongs to Fausto Ferrara.
Complex hospitality programmes, however, require integration between architecture, structures, building systems, landscape, interiors, fire safety, acoustics, energy, technology, logistics and regulatory management.
For this reason, engineering and technical coordination can be developed through Arckeo Executive Workshop, founded in 2004, under Ferrara’s authorial direction.
Technology does not correct the idea afterwards.
It must participate in the construction of the Work.
And the Work must be protected through execution.
Hospitality & Resorts: Place, Permanence and Inhabitable Work
A resort is not a collection of rooms, services and common spaces.
It is an organism inhabited temporarily.
It receives people arriving from elsewhere.
It must orient them.
Protect them.
Bring them into relation with a place.
Construct distance.
Produce memory.
For Fausto Ferrara, architect, artist and author, the question of hospitality begins precisely here.
Not with the image of the hotel.
Not with a theme.
Not with atmosphere.
But with architecture’s ability to transform dwelling, landscape, matter, privacy and time into a unified structure.
When this happens, the resort ceases to be a hospitality product.
It can become an Inhabitable Work.
