R. Seifert & Partners of London have designed many of the major hotel projects in Britain of recent years, including the Royal Garden, Kensington, The Britannia, Grosvenor Square and the New Bedford, Brighton. Current designs on the drawing board include a 1,000-bedroom project in Cromwell Road, London, two hotels near London Airport and two Thamesside developments. Here Richard Seifert, FRIBA, expresses some of his own thoughts on the design of
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Tomorrow's hotels
THOUGH the future is seen as being dominated by machines, an age of diminishing individuality and increas- ing standardisation, I do not expect these influences to rule the design of tomorrow's hotels.
The hotel market is diverse, and will remain so. Guests will always want comfort and good service as their fun- damental requirements, and the extent to which these can be provided by hotel operators is a matter only of the price which the traveller is prepared to pay.
The architect plays a key role in helping the hotelier to create the chosen environment in which all the appropriate services can be provided. The individual outlook is shown by the fact that no two design briefs are ever alike. No two hotel operators however large, experienced and in- formed they are of their market re- quirements have exactly the same concept of the environment needed by their guests. This diversity is likely to continue, for the market contains a wide spectrum of tastes and means, and will widen rather than contract.
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Proposed hotel at King's Reach, Southwark, London
There are several strong pointers to future developments in hotel design. The biggest influence on hotel market- ing today is airline tourism. Every air line is anxious to create a package deal with hotel operators, and it is in this fast developing field that the stiffest competition lies. Because of this, the location of new hotels must take ac- count of the ease with which airports can be reached. It is this consideration, rather than the arbitrary ideas of plan- ners, which will govern hotel siting.
The airline packages favour large hotels with from 300 to 1000 bed rooms. Today the economic lower limit for a new urban project is cer- tainly 300 bedrooms, as hotels below this size do not show worthwhile sav- ings in relation to the facilities that have to be provided. The architect has to understand the economics of hotel operation fully before he can produce designs that really work, so these mar keting concepts have to be in the fore. front of his thinking.
Tomorrow's hotels are getting big- ger because of these economic in- fluences. And if, as is likely, passenger
aircraft are designed to carry even larg. er complements than the jumbo jet, we shall see this trend continue, pos- sibly towards hotels with 2000 or
more rooms.
Size poses new problems that are only beginning to be solved. For exam- ple, in the years to come we shall have to find still better ways of handling the movement of large numbers of guests in and out of hotels at short intervals. This is even now influencing designs of the most recent hotels, in the provision of much more space in the reception area and foyers, in the methods of baggage handling that are being installed, and also in the systems of accounting, checking-in and check- ing-out.
The architect knows that lower- grade labour will be tomorrow's big- gest trouble spot in the hotel industry, and he designs, so far as is possible, to reduce the total labour force required. But hotel operators will not easily ac- cept the use of mechanical systems to replace personal service.
Recently we carried out a putative design project for a site in London, the
Far East BUILDER, May 1971
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