Envisaging the hotel of the future | By James Law

Synopsis

If the 20th century was an era of conventional hotel design, the beginning of the 21st century has seen the arrival of new forms of hotel design. The growth in urban hotels, boutique hotels, resort hotels, and other permutations of the typical hotel model has yielded a great variety of hotel designs around the world. However, as architect James Law of the Hong Kong-based firm James Law Cybertecture writes, what may set the 21st Century era hotel design from its predecessors is the rapid innovation in everything. Raised design- consciousness and the rapid adoption of technology will yield a new generation of hotels that will be systemically different from before. “They will be different,” he says, “because the people who stay in them will stay there for new reasons, with new personalities, and with new lifestyles that never even existed before.”