At first sight, accommodating refugees in tourism establishments seems an obvious idea. In Austria this approach to housing asylum seekers is not a new phenomenon, but has a history going back 60 years - including periods when up to 95 per cent of asylum seekers in Austria have been accommodated in tourist establishments of different sizes and types - and stands for a national asylum policy that handles the provision of space for people who have been forced to flee as a short-term issue.
Towards an Architecture of Hospitality confronts contemporary practices of reusing run-down tourism establishments with designs for new building typologies that enable autonomous forms of living and arriving. The course will be based on field research in hotels that are currently used as asylum seeker accommodation. The design process will begin with an analysis of refugees' practices of arrival and appropriation and the subversive tactics that are employed to navigate the rules imposed on the use of space.
Superstudio, Monumento Continuo, 1969.
The design course seeks for "real utopias" that create spaces for an unconditional hospitality at five selected hotel sites in Vienna, Lower Austria and Upper Austria and envision spatial qualities for a new form of accommodation hosting asylum seekers. The architectural program of the design results from the overlap of two radically different concepts - the voluntary escape from everyday life of the tourist and the search for an everyday life of a migrant who has been forced to flee.
The designs will be part of a publication that demands specific spatial guidlines to enable living in a condition of forced migration.
The design course is part of the project Fluchtraum Österreich, http://fluchtraum.at and the MORE Initiative.
