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A Periphery with a View: Hotel Space and the Catalan Modern Experience

lthough it has served as an important gateway space between the local and the global for more than a century and a half, the modern hotel has received surprisingly little critical attention. This is especially remarkable because the hotel is a ready-made conduit for transculturation; it not only facilitates contact but also produces the détente necessary for the processes of assimilation. Hotels at once embody the grey zone between public and private, the transience of the tourist, and in the case of a postmodern city such as Las Vegas, the ultimate victory of simulacrum over monumental authenticity. When parts of chains, they are interurban spaces that encourage and, to a certain degree, enforce the replication of spatial practice from one city to another. They are connected intimately to transport systems, a relationship that became especially close during the West’s vibrant nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the rise of the grand hotel mirrored that of rail and motorways. During that period, hotels anchored city centers, commanded views of beaches and mountains, and became destinations themselves, sites the images of which adorned postcards and the ephemera of the world traveler. Integrated and implicated as it was in the flows of modernity—and now in the discontinuities of postor supermodernity—the hotel must figure in our understanding of the relationship between an increasingly complex notion of what may be called global “conduct” (movement of goods and people, behavior, styles, and aesthetics) and the experience of the built environment of the modern metropolis. In this article I trace the way in which the hotel resonates in the expression and experience of modernity in the metropolis of one particular region: Catalonia, a stateless nation that struggled against its peripheral status throughout its modernizing period.