EDITORIAL
S
o often one's understanding of what is appropriate
in a design scheme is driven by a ubiquitous international
aesthetic language that espouses a uniform solution for
every project, no matter the location.
Recently, a hotel manager pointed out that a room I was
occupying included a bathroom that was the prototype
chosen for the redesign of the entire hotel. I recalled that
a previous comprehensive architectural design for an
earlier incarnation of the same hotel had been conceived
for a location built by the same chain in Phoenix, Arizona,
though the manager and I were on Mediterranean shores.
I am concerned that, yet again, distant central planning
authorities have implemented, in the gray tones of the
bathroom, a color and materials concept better suited
to Dusseldorf or Chicago than the sunny climes of the
Mediterranean.
Other rooms in the hotel have already been converted to
an atmosphere so gray and somber that Alfred Hitchcock
would be able to use them, unaltered, as the setting for a
Twilight Zone episode.
The sun rises spectacularly above the eastern extreme of
the seaside view from the room I occupied, and continues
its journey uninterrupted by rain, fog, smog or haze
across the sky for months on end. Yet designers of the
commodious bathroom, which included a single glass
floor to ceiling window pane opening a view corridor from
the bathroom across the bedroom and the terrace out to
the sea, did not afford themselves the easy arrangement
HYLAND
