CROSS IT HOTEL
TEAM: Zeina Abou zeid – Holy spirit university of kaslik
The project aims to address society’s most ambiguous issue: The Toll of Sleep Loss. Going to the very basis of sleep loss we find insomnia, caused by mental and/or emotional disturbance.
The Cross it hotel, is a post-critical, socio-experimental architecture that addresses the antidote of sleep and offers humans a solution to their torture. It explores a spiritual field never challenged by architecture before:
Willing “customers” are welcomed to access the hotel by paying with their sins.
The bigger and more numerous the sins, the longer the stay, the narrower and more torturing the cross. Thus the moto “THE BIGGER YOUR SIN, THE LONGER YOUR STAY”.
Going back in history, the cross has been an ancient instrument of capital punishment: the method of slow and painful execution in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden beam and left to hang for several days until eventual death from exhaustion and asphyxiation.
Here, humans, by their ambiguous stay, will be making up for their sins and wrong doings which have become an unbearable weight keeping them from peacefully sleeping at night.
The cross hotel doesn’t have any beds: Only crosses. Customers will be sleeping standing inside the elements. No separate rooms will be available, but instead big and small courts including numerous crosses, the goal is to reduce people’s egos and pride, to make them humble through humiliation by exposing them to the public, adding profound meaning to this disturbingly proposed architecture. If we want to grow in godliness we must grow in understanding the significance of the cross which confronts the most prevalent and insidious of all sins, namely pride.
The crosses wanting the bodies, are human-sized architectural elements connected to the very structure of the hotel building like human veins and arteries.
The hotel building is a biomorphic organism inspired by our circulatory system. The floors and spaces escape every space hierarchy. The structure seems to be growing from its underground roots to the skies. Symbolically deliberating visitors from their earthly problems and aiming for the higher self.