The Illegal Hotel
The Illegal Hotel‚ is an installation of sleeping pods for interns disguised as the lighting system of an architectural office. It unveils the precarious life and the economic regime that the recently graduate architecture students confront when they leave the school.
Architectural offices are partially supported by the work of recently graduated interns. Interns work for free, as the less respected group in the office hierarchy, make coffee, photocopies, barely sleep or eat and require an external financial support to enjoy of such privileges. This project explores the internal contradictions of architectural production embodied in the figure of the intern. It reveals how architects would eventually treat interns as labour pets, so they do not ever need to leave the office or see the daylight.
Given a certain well-kwon architectural office located in a centric loft in Manhattan, we designed a series of sleeping pods for interns disguised as the lighting system. The lamps-pods are deployable and once open they can be reached from the ground and interconnected. Each one houses two individual mattresses and folds back to the lamp mode in seconds, avoiding the danger of unexpected city officials inspections. Now interns really belong to the office, plugged to the electric system like any other drafting device!