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| Wharton: "Host country
governments and investors wanted Hilton to build in modern,
not indigenous styles" |
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 hat
is it about hotels that can be so seductive to a traveler of a certain
temperament, the kind of person who willingly leaves the familiar
behind forthe uncertain rewards of temporary quarters, of someone
else’s mostly impersonal room with—or without—a view,
whose every comfort or disappointment comes at a price? Some travelers
prefer to stay in hotels, even when friends or relatives in the places
where they touch down kindly offer to put them up.
Some hotels, effusive in their offerings of plush services
and “amenities,” as their enticements are known in the trade,
have come to be regarded as desirable destinations in their own right.
Spa treatments, personal trainers, unique architecture, blue-ribbon
cuisine, concierges on every floor—such are the attractions of
these top-ranked and often pricey hotels in today’s fiercely
competitive market.
Many other hotels around the world are plain and undistinguished,
even mediocre. There is nothing special about a roadside Motel 6 or
most downtown Ramada Inns, with their dropped ceilings and stale air,
and the forced cheeriness of their by-the-numbers décor. Some
cities boast a handful of great hotels but might not be, strictly
speaking, great hotel cities. In this era of global everything, in
which a kind of post-capitalist corporate totalitarianism has displaced
the powers of governments and helped boil rich, local cultures down
to a gluey stew for tourists, the notion of a hotel as a monument
to the customs, history, style, and aspirations of a people and the
city they call home has largely faded.
Nevertheless, some establishments still embody the quirky,
deeply personal, sometimes regal traits that earned them singular
reputations in the first place and that loyal customers adore; they
have not yet been gobbled up or “upgraded,” meaning disastrously
homogenized, by huge multinational chains, with their bottom-line
business ethos and aesthetics of blandness. Among the holdouts: the
artist-filled Hotel Chelsea in New York; the Brown Palace in Denver,
with its Renaissance-style architecture and Rocky Mountain spring
water piped into every room; and the countless one-star, two-star,
and no-star lodgings across Europe and Asia that continue to offer
travelers more variety, ambiance, and real hotel-culture experience
than any dispiriting corporate chain could ever dream of delivering.
But such companies never do, and that’s the point;
nowadays, only the most unaware consumer fails to recognize that marketing-driven
technocrats can swiftly destroy what an unpredictable confluence of
cultural, social, and economic forces can take generations to create.
And that, invariably, is something precious. It is the most ineffable
equity of any business. It is, for a distinctive hotel, its irresistible,
inestimable soul.
These are some of the themes and circumstances
that weave the cultural, commercial, and historical backdrop for a
new and unprecedented study of the Hilton International hotel chain
by Duke art history professor Annabel Wharton. Published by the University
of Chicago Press, Wharton’s Building the Cold War: Hilton International
Hotels and Modern Architecture is a revealing analysis of how a legendary
American entrepreneur, Conrad Hilton (1887-1979), used the stylistic
language of grand commercial buildings to convey a staunch, cultural-political
ideology—and how he changed the hotel industry in the process.
Wharton, a former head of Duke’s art department,
which offers both art history and studio-practice courses, might seem
an unlikely author for such a book. A medievalist who specializes
in early Christian and Byzantine architecture and painting, Wharton
is interested in how, over time, places like the shrine city of Lourdes,
in southwestern France, or near-mythical cities like Jerusalem became
popular, cult-status destinations that helped give rise to what we
now call tourism. She is interested in the evolution of the institutions,
accoutrements, and customs, such as hotels, guidebooks, sightseeing,
and collecting souvenirs, that have become indelibly associated with
touristic travel.
In Building the Cold War, she puts her cards on the table
and states: “I am an American writing about the Middle East;
I am a medievalist writing about Modernity.” Nevertheless, Wharton
brought firsthand familiarity with her subject to the project. When
she was in college, her parents lived in Iran, where their jobs were
linked to the oil business. Her father’s company—he was
a petroleum engineer—paid for her to travel overseas to visit
them twice a year. Wharton met her parents in London, Rome, Istanbul,
or Athens, where they stayed at Hilton hotels. 
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| Building the
Cold War is Wharton's way of coming to terms with her ambivalence
toward Hiltons, based on a sense that Hiltons powerfully represented
America where America did not necessarily belong. |
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Later, during the early years of her academic career, she returned
to those cities to do research.
That a scholarly work like Building the Cold War is so
obviously shaped by a personal, interpretive perspective gives it
a refreshing, critical voice. “I wasn’t sure I could get
away with it—it was something new for me. But it’s still
very academic writing, don’t you think?” Wharton muses during
an interview in her East Campus office, where a vinyl blow-up Egyptian
mummy doll keeps company with hundreds of art reference books, a modernist
stamped-metal armchair, and a smattering of gilt-edged Eastern icons.
The book, she says, is “my means of coming to terms
with the ambivalence toward Hiltons that I experienced, an ambivalence
that proceeded from a sense that Hiltons powerfully represented America
where America did not necessarily belong.” That Wharton felt
those hotels’ collective vibe, that she intuitively understood
the messages they conveyed—about high customer-service standards,
physical security and comfort, and the commercial power they represented—was,
she later learned, no accident.
Conrad Hilton, who was born in New Mexico and
began buying up hotels in Texas in 1919, fashioned an international
corporate empire by rustling up co-investors to help him acquire numerous
properties. In 1949, he famously went after and leased New York’s
Waldorf-Astoria (“the greatest of them all”), and in 1954
his company took over the Statler chain. (Founder E.M. Statler’s
slogan: “A bed and a bath for a buck and a half.” Hilton
would be remembered for a more prosaic pronouncement posted in his
guests’ bathrooms, reminding them to place their shower curtains
inside their tubs.)
Hilton’s first property outside the continental United
States was the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which opened
in 1949. Building the Cold War examines the magnate’s Hilton
International projects in two other geographic regions: those in London,
Berlin, and Rome; and those in Cairo, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Athens,
and Istanbul. Wharton explains that, for his ambitious ventures in
these culturally and politically diverse cities, the crafty Hilton
structured deals in which local, often public funds—or, in Europe,
post-World War II Marshall Plan aid from the United States—financed
construction. Typically, Hilton structured deals in which host-country
investors paid for and retained ownership of the hotel buildings that
bore his name; often, they were erected on what had been public-park
land. Host-country partners contracted with his U.S.-based Hilton
organization to manage each new hotel and split revenues with it in
a mutually profitable arrangement.
Hilton’s overseas partners eagerly sought what he
could uniquely provide: cost-efficient, innovative “American
know-how” at a time—the late 1950s and the 1960s—when
U.S. management expertise was something special, authoritative, and
rare. Hilton International hotels offered special features such as
a third tap, for chilled drinking water, in every guest’s bathroom.
They were often sited, Wharton says, “like great civic monuments.”
With their sleek, cutting-edge architecture and carefully chosen locations,
they were often the first significant modern structures to be built
in their host cities. In some, such as London or Tel Aviv, they redefined
a historic place’s urban plan and its relationship to major aspects
of the surrounding cityscape or landscape, such as public squares,
roadways, or the seacoast.
The physical placement of each new high-rise, Wharton
explains, intentionally allowed spectacular views to become key elements
of a customer’s Hilton International experience. Uncluttered,
simple lines; sculptural, poured concrete; fine materials; and large
expanses of plate glass distinguished their design and construction.
“Glass was the essential means” by which Hilton International
hotel buildings were “dematerialized,” Wharton says. Large
windows allowed customers to savor grand vistas from every guestroom
and to grasp easily at a glance the layout or “the anatomy”
of each hotel.
continues on page two |
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