A big yawn has greeted the news that Marriott and Ritz Carlton will build a combination hotel/condo across from the Staples Center.
According to an article in Los Angeles Business, “Marriott Hotel Services will be the operator of the 876-room Los Angeles Marriott Marquis which will house the Los Angeles Convention Center, while Marriott International’s (NYSE: MAR) subsidary Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. will run the 124-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Los Angeles, which will be located on top of Marriott Marquis.”
The illustrations recall the dullest corporate styles of the 1960’s, like something along New York’s Avenue of the Americas or our own Century City. How could they propose something that banal in 2006? Is Donald Trump on the Ritz Carlton board of directors?
Perhaps the hotel suits have not heard of a man named Frank Gehry. He has shown that a building must look like a piece of couture. It should flow with sensual abandon, caressing the steel structure as a silk nightgown caresses a woman’s body. It must be nipped and tucked and hemmed and taken in various places. The façade must never be rendered in right angles. It must bend and weave, whirl and gyrate so that the materials seem to be a living, breathing protoplasm.
What would Mr. Gehry do with the rigidly dull Ritz Carlton/Marriott project? Why he would put the Gehry stamp on it! It would have to be diaphanous, visionary, ethereal.
If he walked into the hotel chain headquarters and got his hands on the blueprints….
He would rip the façade of right angles right off and shake it out and when he sewed it back onto the building it would be so beautiful that it could walk down the red carpet at a Hollywood premiere.
Here in Van Nuys 
Test
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We have lots of architecturally interesting hotels in New York City, notably The Hotel on Rivington in the Lower East Side, and LoftHotel in West Chelsea. It’s not true that great design doesn’t help hotel business.
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Let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that no subsidization is going on, however.
Lots of things in society are subsidized. The only thing that would make special tax breaks, current or future, for the proposed hotel inappropriate is if the situation in downtown were comparable to Las Vegas, where owners of hotels have no trouble finding customers. But in Los Angeles, at least downtown, such popularity is a very rare occurance, and as mentioned in one recent article about the Marriott-Ritz, the city attracts fewer major conventions per year than even Indianapolis and Rosemont, Illinois.
If you want to criticize a city for providing subsidies to businesses—and we’re talking large, flat-out, 100% tax breaks—look at New York City. That municipality has been giving special deals for over 25 years to keep large corporations from fleeing to the suburbs or other cities. And to make things even more complicated, I don’t believe New York has a lot of the aboveground power lines you mentioned too.
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Pete, one of the other reasons why hotels tend to shy away from interesting architecture (Las Vegas being an exception) is also the hotels’ corporate behaviors.
For one thing, hotels embrace corporate stylebooks. This is a method from graphic design that’s permeated all operations. Besides a certain logo and font case, hotels now try to homogenize the lodging experience. Much like fast food, the hotel experience must be predictable regardless of regional variations. Also, much like fast food, hotels must now engage in “creative destruction” and remodel as frequently as 5-7 years.
Another thing is that hotel chains often franchise their brands. Yet another way hotels are eerily similar to fast food restaurants. Hotels will often own a few select properties that are company flagships or high-margin properties. The rest are brokered to private individuals, operating companies or real estate investment trusts (REITs). This way, hotels don’t have to bear the burden of siting and construction and focus on strengthening the brand.
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Sorry, D, but as far as academic studies of public policy go, indirect subsidies are still subsidies. The notion that TIFs are essentially free money, which you seem to be putting forth here, rests on the dubious assumption that nothing productive would have been built on the site otherwise.
It’s fine to invest public money in private ventures that generate positive externalities; I’ve spent a good chunk of the last 48 hours writing a quick-and-dirty case study of just such a project, the Alameda Corridor. Let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that no subsidization is going on, however.
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NO MONEY WENT TO THE HOTEL! why is it so hard for people to understand this? the subsidy is that some of the money generated by the hotel will not go to the city, so if there was no building there would be no tax money anyway. the positives of this project FAR outweigh the negatives, if any. Look at all the development spurred by Staples and LA Live. there are 50 Plus projects in DT LA and most are concentrated in the 5 blocks surrounding LA Live. Billions upon Billions have been added to the city tax coffers because of this project.
Great design and im looking forward to seeing it go up. Glad Gehry had no hand in this thing. he owuld have ruined it. Good point about hotels not needing special architecture to draw guests. makes sense. Gehry was perfect for the Grand ave tower, though.
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Gehry is busy designing “diaphanous” skyscrapers to camouflage a scandalously publicly subsidized, locally detested, poorly conceived basketball arena in Brooklyn.
Hotels derive no financial benefit from interesting architecture. Interesting design can sell condos at a premium or satisfy the egos of corporate chieftains, but hotel investors (many of which aesthetically indifferent bodies such as insurers, public or union pension funds, and foundation endowments) want cash flow, period. A simple glass box is a much better way of maximizing square footage and minimizing construction costs. Given the public subsidy going toward the Marriott/Ritz-Carlton, perhaps better architecture would be in order, but perhaps Los Angeles residents would have been better off with that several hundred million dollars going instead to building parks or burying power lines.
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