Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion - Softcover

Denby, Elaine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861891210 ISBN 13: 9781861891211

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2004

Synopsis

Grand Hotels is the fruit of the many years Elaine Denby has devoted to travels and visits throughout Europe, North America, the Near East and the Orient; it is a fascinating architectural and social history that covers the globe from the 1830s to the 1930s, but which also takes note of the most recent refurbishments.

The styles of architecture and decor have varied enormously for grand hotels: a French Renaissance château manner for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1880s; a fantastic Moorish-style confection for the Tampa Bay on Florida's Gulf Coast (1891); Art Deco for Oliver Hill's seaside Midland Grand at Morecombe in England (1933). And the services available were equally stunning: Turkish baths, rifle-ranges, even a fleet of vintage Rolls-Royces at Hong-Kong's Peninsula. To keep this illusory world glittering, the reality had to run like clockwork, with managers like César Ritz, king of hoteliers, monitoring every detail from ballrooms to basement boilers. Grand Hotels explores every aspect of this all-but-vanished world of opulence, from the entrepreneurs, architects and designers who made it possible to the ambitious individuals and dynasties that kept it going.

About this title

About the Author:

Elaine Denby is an architect and a member of the RIBA and the Art Workers Guild.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Although childhood is the source and model of all architecture, grand hotels included, the Grand Hotel Nymphlight is the only one known to be specifically devoted to 'the child within,' as the hotel brochure puts it." The grand hotels that Coover, best known as a trailblazing fiction writer and proselyte of hypertext, describes in this small book of prose poems belong to the "hotel" series by the American dioramist Joseph Cornell, making this book a set of brochures to the marvelous. The Grand Hotel Night Air Balloon ("originally designed as a colorful hot air balloon") boasts a lobby filled with caged tropical birds, a musical fountain and rooms without walls, all enveloped in a "blue haze" recalling helium. The Grand Hotel Nymphlight temporarily transforms its residents into innocent, joyful childhood versions of themselves, "while yet knowing what one knows as an adult," and The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain, a "hotel of brief encounters," provides the ultimate therapy for the alienated wallflower, never permitting anyone do anything alone opening a door, riding an elevator except leave. Coover, with magnificent simplicity, orchestrates countering strands of pathos and wonder, decadence and innocent glee, in these 10 short chapters that are sure to make anyone permanently dissatisfied with the run-down bed-and-breakfast we call planet Earth. (May) Forecast: Coover is classed with John Barth and Donald Barthelme as a fiction writer, and is particularly well read on campus. A creative display might feature this small press book, Utopia Parkway (a semi-recent biography of Cornell) and Grand Hotels, a smart and heavily illustrated architectural history by Elaine Denby covering the international luxe life of the 1830s-1930s (June).
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1861891210
• ISBN 13: 9781861891211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304