Eminence Trade is a boutique hotel segment that elevates aspirants’ real life and online presence. It is part of The Hotel, a collective project that studies the hotel, both as a building type and as a place of hospitality, through a collection of fourteen individual contributions inside one skyscraper. The project imagines hospitality as a realm of exchange that condenses the diversity of the city through an assortment of guests, staff, and the broader public.

The hotel is a function of temporality and hospitality. The study questions the requirements for an architecture of hospitality to welcome, host, and entertain. As an architecture of temporality—an architecture that is dynamic and ever-changing, embodying a sense of transience and constant activity—the hotel allows for experimentation, while anticipating adaptation to meet the changing demands of its temporary residents. The hotel, as type, is understood beyond its curated front. It is, instead, a place of anonymity and exchange, of served and serving, a place characterized by short stays in a lasting structure.

The skyscraper, as a formal and monumental object, appears to contrast the hotel’s temporality. In its autonomy, the skyscraper is a landmark in the skyline. Located in Midtown Manhattan—on the former site of Hotel Pennsylvania and adjacent to Penn Station—this project is a reflection on the metropolis of New York City.

The Hotel consists of the design of the skyscraper as landmark—The Metropolitan—and the hotel as tenant—One Hotel.

Collective propositions:
1. The Hotel embraces the frenetic energy of New York City while opposing its outward expansion.
2. The Metropolitan will outlast One Hotel.
3. One Hotel accommodates fourteen types of guests, and its staff.
4. One Hotel shares accommodation, amenities, systems, and services with a 24/7 cycle.
5. The Hotel sets a standard for an architecture of hospitality.

Boutique Segment Propositions:
1. Eminence Trade is accessible to aspirants of all incomes and backgrounds.
2. Eminence Trade offers a place of comfort, adjacency, ambition, eminence, and equality.
3. Eminence Trade, the luxurious flagship of One Hotel’s brand, differentiates a plethora of private, public, and partnership amenities to ensure its leading-edge business model.
4. Eminence Trade, as a place of sublimity and exclusivity, offers temporal and unilateral types of use of accommodation and amenities within One Hotel.
5. In a city of aspiration, Eminence Trade signifies eminence but does not equate
elevating above others. ... Read more

This research explores the entanglement of relations of bodies and cities, in the heterogeneous contemporary city. Wherein, the othering of bodies has become an increasingly (problematic) complexity, due to its relations with obsolete embodiments of (historic) notions of power. The research question that is investigated, questions how we can create an architecture of affect, within the in-between relations of bodies and cities, that could establish renewed ideologies amongst bodies which may go beyond the practices of othering.
The research reacts and continues the work of earlier philosophers that have expressed on this entanglement, and probes how to go beyond theory to find applicability of these theories to spatial research and design.
Theories by Michel Foucault are put in relation to theories by Elisabeth Grosz and Donna Haraway. Herewith, the heterogeneity of cities and the in-between relations of power, bodies, architectures, and cities were researched in its potentials and applicability. Subsequently, following a positioning towards othering practices, with the use of the Greater City of London as case study.

The relations of bodies and cities are considered from the in-between of their relations, specifically determined by the model of relations which specify their conditions. What results, is a continuously changing accumulation of reciprocate processes that shape cities' heterogeneity. Conducted through relations of power, as institutionalism, hierarchical bodies-cities relations provide a systemics of othering within different layers and scales.

Following the potential of heterogeneity, the essay proposes an intensification of the cities' heterogeneous conditions as diffusion of in-between relations. Consequently, the conditioning, strategization, and operationalization of the in-between was investigated, to determine how a reconstruction of the in-between through architectural intervention could be affective.
As a result, the essay proposes architectures of fragmentation that reuses the divergence of (existing) in-between relations, to complexify the concatenation of processes. With additionally, the materialization of constrasting experiences and sensations, to have the potential to establish affective (architectural) relations with bodies.

Within my graduation project "In-Between Others", the architecture re-establishes relations between dichotomies of different typological bodies (human, urban, architectural, power), exploring the potential of (spatial) in-betweens. While simultaneously, it reflects on the relations of bodies of others (urban, machine, natural, animal, architectural). With this, the conditioning of bodies' confrontations, in order to control their conceptions and performances. Ultimately, to establish the beyond of othering, both through, as within, (spatial) disciplines. ... Read more