CHRIS FORD OFFICE

Hotel

Roswell NM

October 1999

Our process for this speculative hotel, sponsored by The Court of Architecture, required the identification of influences since the Roswell incident (July 08 1947) that have shaped popular attitudes about extra-terrestrial life.  By explicitly identifying these influences, we are in an advantageous position to generate multiple hotel solutions that would resonate with the subconscious expectations for such a building type belonging to both residents and visitors to Roswell NM.  While these influences did not dictate the course of the design, they did act as a point of departure for thinking about the site strategy, programmatic composition, and occupancy groups of the proposed solution. 

 

• Craters form when a foreign body impacts the Earth with great force. 

 

• Images of alien beings possess a high level of self-similarity.  The chosen image is a wireframe reconstruction from an alleged alien autopsy. 

 

• Voyager I & II are NASA research satellites and were launched in August and September of 1977.  They are the outer-most man-made objects in space and remain operational in 2009.  While both Voyagers were

 

designed for a scientific mission, they were also designed to be the first likely interface with extra-terrestrial life — Coordinated by astronomer Carl Sagan, each Voyager Record was outfitted with 118 pictures, the first two bars of the Beethoven Cavatina, greetings in 54 languages, whale songs, and music.  The physical composition of Voyager is a skeletal structure which supports an assemblage of 65,000 diverse yet hierarchal parts, each of which is highly specific to their own performative role. 

 

• HAL is the on-board computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  More than any other single example from science fiction culture, HAL is regarded as a cultural harbinger of feared problems with artificial intelligence and humanity’s increased dependency upon technology.

 

• On October 15 1997 @ 4:43am, the Cassini interplanetary probe was launched from Cape Canaveral FL during a rare night launch, which illuminated the night sky for several miles.