It doesn’t exist yet….but we have been working with local people, artists, architects and makers to imagine the possibilities. How could a community could manufacture and host its own Artist Hotel?
In November 2015 we held an Ideas Camp to consider how resources (people, places and materials) could be remixed to prototype a new type of hotel that engages people, place and art. The Ideas Camp included curated walks around the neighbourhood, provocations and hands-on prototyping at The Factory –our new digital manufacturing space. Together we explored the possibilities of networks, curated spaces in people’s homes and digitally fabricated habitats.
That month we also held a Family Fun Re-Mix: Please Make Up my Room where everyone got their hands dirty with different types of craft, art and tech materials. Friendly artists and makers helped people of all ages develop ideas, turn visions into realities and see new digital manufacturing technology in action.
This culminated in an exhibition ‘A Room with a View‘ exploring the form the Hotel could take and what its relationship with the local community and surrounding landscape might be. The exhibition includes prototypes of hotel rooms, designed and constructed by Interior Architecture students from the University of the West of England (UWE) and a series of new photographs, Five Thousand Island Forest, by Nicholas White, which document the landscape of Bristol and its outer edges. In creating the exhibition, the students from UWE collaborated with artists, KWMC: The Factory, 00 Architecture and local people.
On the first day of the exhibition the public were invited to join the students for a special event: ‘Behind the scenes of the Artist Hotel‘. They gave a tour of the exhibition, presented real-scale prototypes of hotel rooms and talked about their ideas and processes of design and construction. The prototypes were then reviewed by an expert panel of architects, artists and designers.
The exhibition opening also included live performances by artists Sam Halmarack, Richard Layzell, Rachael Miles and Hannah Clark.
The Artist Hotel is intended as an ideas space for conversations about how local people, artists and architects can better collaborate to make the kind of spaces and places we say we want, but which the market so often fails to deliver. The Artist Hotel is equally a live test space – experimenting with new materials and ways of mixing digital manufacturing and community participation.
