Robert A. Davidson <i>The Hotel: Occupied Space</i>
10.13125/2039-6597/3918
Recensione del libro The Hotel: Occupied Space di Robert A. Davidson.
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2039-6597
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Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith
Between
Robert A. Davidson, <i>The Hotel: Occupied Space</i>
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Between the Texts/Reviews: Ed. Giulio Iacoli, Beatrice Seligardi, Claudia Cao
2019-11-30
2019-12-05
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Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith
2019/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/3918
2039-6597
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Robert A. Davidson, <i>The Hotel: Occupied Space</i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3918/3495
9
                Robert A. Davidson
              The Hotel: Occupied Space

     Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2018, 224 pp.
       Associated equally with the buzzing of a seedy neon sign as it is
with the glamour of the Ritz, the modern hotel is a study in contrasts
that Robert Davidson, in his new book The Hotel: Occupied Space (2018)
thoroughly explores as valuable case studies for understanding
contemporary cosmopolitanism and globalization. Take, for example,
that during the day hotel rooms are lethargic and empty while at night
they become lived-in spaces, as intimate and alive as a home.
Furthermore, while they provide travelers with intimate personal space,
they are also the conduits of worldwide connectivity, what Davidson
terms “global conduct” or the “movement of goods and people,
behavior, styles and aesthetics” (3) across the planet.
       This dialectic – between intimacy and globalization - is the
backdrop against which he defines his concept of occupancy, a state of
being unique to modernity expressed alongside the equation “space
over time” (4), that anchors his research of representations of the hotel
across a wide array of 20th century and contemporary media. Conceived
in contrast to the Heideggerian notion of dwelling, and distinct from
both the family dynamics that characterize the home and the cultural
conventions that govern public spaces, occupancy serves as a useful tool
not only for describing the modern subject’s relationship to this
multipotent built environment, but also as one of the main conditions
that inspire its representation by artists and journalists.
       It is fitting, then, that the book is divided into two main parts, The
Realm of the Imagination and The Built Environment. In the first part, the
highly mutable concept of occupancy carries forward Siegfried
Kracauer’s observation that denizens of the liminal space of the hotel


Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)
Robert A. Davidson, The Hotel: Occupied Space (Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith)



lobby, especially as represented in the German detective novel, become
“tensionless”. While the critic of early mass culture posits the space as a
“negative church”, a place for those “who neither seek nor find the one
who is always sought” (5), Davidson contends that the hotel exerts a
positive force through provision of a “secular sanctuary” (6), fostering a
sense of temporal decompression experienced by the traveller for whom
time and space are effectively condensed in the midst of increasingly fast
modern travel. It is precisely the artist’s perception of an interaction with
the built environment as distinct from hurriedness, pressure, or tension
that the book’s first chapter, The Pictorial Hotel, seeks to explore through
an analysis of several of Edward Hopper’s most famous paintings.
Notably, 1931’s Hotel Room is read as a case study for the potential of the
modern subject to engage in “détente” (20) with their surrounding built
environment. Davidson upholds the celebrated painting as the first
appearance on canvas of a subject incarnating a state of occupancy,
distinct from a notion of ennui or the supposed alienation inherent to
modern metropolitan existence critiqued by the Kracauer.
       It should be noted that the defining question of the painting, “is
the subject coming or going?” is analogous to the ambiguity that so
perturbs the great German critic in his reflections on the alienation of
modern urban life. While this negative attitude toward the hotel with
which Davidson contends is steeped in a suspicion of the increasing
spectacularization of modern culture, positing the hotel as a space for
empty performances, Davidson turns his attention to journalism and
reconfigures the performative potential of the hotel as a particular
source of intrigue through an analysis of photographs of the military
occupation of the Habana Libre hotel, a truly transnational space that
functioned as a staging ground of both capitalist and socialist
revolution. The second chapter, The Cinematic Hotel, further explores the
performative potential of the hotel as analyses of films ranging from El
hotel eléctrico (de Chomón, 1905) to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation
(2003) highlight the space’s facilitation of meetings of disparate people.
A particularly detailed study of Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) allows for a
reflection on prostitution and the mutation of the equation of occupancy
that gives extra weight to the exchange of money for time and the


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infrastructure of hospitality that characterizes the contractual nature of
the hotel. Throughout, Davidson effectively explores how the medium
of the moving picture can inform our understanding of the inherent
temporal element of the equation of occupancy, while also contributing
to a naturalization of how we experience it in the hotel space itself,
something perhaps less effective with non time-based media. This
nuances what another book that also focuses on artists’ and
cinematographers’ representations of urban spaces, Vincenzo Trione’s
Effetto Città (Bompiani, 2014), calls the difference between “cities of
situations” rather than “cities of space”, that can be used to distinguish
the modern metropolis since it is no longer governed by geometrical
perspective as cities were in the past, but rather now require flexibility
from their inhabitants to accommodate their constant change. Indeed,
both thinkers suggest that it is not so much the spatial axis, but the
temporal one, that accounts for the connectedness of contemporary
cosmopolitan experience.
       As we turn to the built environment in the second half of the book,
the performative aspect required of the hotel is pushed to its extreme
and the concept of occupancy takes on a political urgency through the
distinction between travel by choice and forced travel, or displacement.
In Chapter Three: The Wartime Hotel Davidson explores how hotels have
functioned as sanctuaries for members of the media during prolonged
armed conflicts. These are travellers by choice who have been pinned
down by circumstance, whose journalistic gaze, Davidson posits,
resembles in a jarring fashion that of the sniper in its negotiation of the
built environment. He contends that these two vectors in fact collided in
a tragedy that changed the wartime hotel forever, namely the direct
strike by American forces on the Hotel Palestine during the Battle of
Baghdad that effectively ended what had previously been the wartime
hotel’s “real-world symbolic status as a secular sanctuary” (90), a site
where reporters could gather in relative safety and disseminate
information. The sophisticated and provocative comparison between
the gaze of the tourist and that of the wartime sniper is set up brilliantly
by an analysis of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). Through
his reading of the novel, Davidson highlights Orwell’s simultaneous


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Robert A. Davidson, The Hotel: Occupied Space (Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith)



identities as sniper, victim of a sniper’s bullet, and tourist in wartime
Barcelona, which, though distinct from one another, share a
characteristic increased awareness of the surrounding built
environment, whether out of volition or vital necessity.
        Chapter Four, The Displacement Hotel, considers occupancy’s
validity in the context of national borders and inflections of state power.
Through an analysis of representations of detention centers for migrants
and refugees, people for whom travel is undertaken unwillingly or
under duress, Davidson explores the tension between private and public
spaces and the inversion of occupancy’s decompression effect. Indeed,
perhaps no one is as in need of the privacy that hotel rooms afford
voluntary travellers as the migrant who is shoved in the public eye,
suddenly the subject of political debate in the most vulnerable of times.
For these travellers, the hotel room of the detention hotel is mutated into
a cell, and the equation of occupancy inverted by the migrant’s impeded
free movement. To understand this dynamic, Davidson includes
comparisons between representations of refugee camps to those of
hotels, considering works such as the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda to further
nuance this intersection of intimacy and globalization. As he
emphasizes, however, in keeping with the multifaceted nature of the
hotel, its function as a place of refuge can still be found alongside this
mutated form. The chapter ends with an analysis of the CBC radio
documentary Hotel Limbo (2016), which chronicles Toronto’s Plaza
Hotel’s role in welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada and the
surrounding public reaction.
        It should be noted that this last example hints at the unique
perspective that Davidson, as a Canadian expert on Catalan modernism,
brings to the topic at hand. His interest in modern urban spaces can be
traced back to his first monograph, Jazz Age Barcelona (University of
Toronto Press, 2009). While jazz music was indeed the sound of the
modern city during els feliços vint, today, it could very well be considered
that of tourists’ suitcases rolling down the paved streets as the Catalan
capital finds itself at the heart of heated debate about the radically
changing hospitality industry in the globalized sharing economy. In a
diachronic way, Davidson frames this situation through an


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interpretation of the transatlantic potential of Catalan modernisme and its
desire to overcome its peripheral condition as the book’s conclusion,
Hotel Attraction, focuses on an illustration that fittingly encapsulates the
intersection of the built environment and the realm of the imagination:
a sketch by one of Antoni’s Gaudì’s disciples of a hotel intended to be
built in New York that was falsely attributed to the master architect
himself.
       In concluding as such, Davidson makes an original contribution
to a growing body of scholarship seeking to remedy the relative lack of
study on what his introduction titles the overlooked space in studies of
Modernism. Distinct from the exhaustive survey of scholarship on the
history of the hotel found in Kevin J. James’ Histories, Meanings and
Representations of the Modern Hotel (Channel View Publications, 2018), its
assemblage of sources unique to Davidson’s perspective and its original
articulation of the concept of occupancy makes The Hotel: Occupied Space
a topical study that, while broad in scope, is refreshingly clear and
accessible to anyone interested in our evolving relationship with the
built environment in the age of global conduct.




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Robert A. Davidson, The Hotel: Occupied Space (Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith)




                                      L’autore
Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith

      Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith is a PhD candidate in the Italian
section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at
Harvard University.

       Email: mgriffith@g.harvard.edu



                                   The review
Date sent: 15/09/2019
Date accepted: 30/10/2019
Date published: 30/11/2019




                        How to quote this review
Matthew D’Ambrosio Griffith, “Robert A. Davidson, The Hotel: Occupied
Space”, Finzioni. Verità, bugie, mondi possibili, Eds. R. Galvagno – M.
Rizzarelli – M. Schilirò – A. Scuderi, Between, IX.18 (2019),
www.betweenjournal.it




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