28 Dec 2015

Contemporary hotels: Alternative models and quests

01 May, 2014 – 01 May, 2017

Author: Assoc. Prof. Arch. Maria Davcheva, PhD, Architecture Department

1. State of Affairs
The subject of the essence of hotels is often developed in research and applied works, especially following the growing interest in these over the recent decade. There are a few works on the matter in Bulgaria by architects, economists, researchers in the fields of tourism and business administration, etc., with research degrees, while the subject has been more extensively developed abroad. The ripe need for alternative solutions to the known for the time being architectural models and particularly to those of the hotels is an under-researched subject. At the same time, the large number of experimental processes in real architecture resulted in quantitative changes and new, alternative versions of the structure. This, practically, brought up unequivocally the issue of analysing and evaluating as well as the necessity for proposing new models of future hotels at a research level.
My personal research in this line are based on my book, Contemporary Trade Centres in Bulgaria 1990–2010 and the conclusions drawn therein concerning new formats of the development of future trade centres. My second research work, a planned task at the Institute of Art Studies, Retail Parks as a Version of Contemporary Trade Centres’ Future Development builds on the research done in my book and opens up new architectural fields for research of analogical nature, relevance and pressing need for analyses and assumptions.

2. Innovation, Methodology, Ideas
Innovative here is not the study of hotel archetype in principle or as a regulatory framework for designing, but rather the experimental lines of the model’s development and of the principle concept of it. It is not a precedent that practice would leave research behind, but is good reason to timely conduct the necessary research, analyses and assumptions of the model. I’d accentuate foreign architectural achievements in an attempt to propose these as knowledge and versions of the application in a Bulgarian context before the process has commenced in this country.
The methodology would rely on a complex approach: general and specific methods of scientific knowledge, interdisciplinary discourse, an analysis and a synthesis of major comparisons and analogies, deduction and induction, intuitive and logical methods of comparison and processing.

3. Goal
The project seeks to systematize and synthesize already built or just designed models abroad, applicable in Bulgaria. No fundamental conclusions could be drawn given the specifics of the problematics, living and developing just now or in the immediate future. The opportunity for a real-time contact will be the major source of information to build the analysis on.

4. Relevance
The relevance of the issue under consideration is beyond any doubt, in view of the exhaustion of the best part of the existing architectural types globally. Research works are the laboratory, where experiments should be conducting leading to metamorphoses of the existing models and justifying new ones. It is of paramount importance to the buildings that are in the epicentre of the designing and construction boom and this is what the hotels in Bulgaria are over the recent decade, at present and in the foreseeable future.