The Hospitality Mass Market Typology
“Events cannot happen at just any moment, but are the aftershocks of the birth or new stage of an object.” – Graham Harman, Immaterialism
This form of inquiry into the historic context of global tourism in Hawai’i engages objects as agents positioned within complex intersecting relations to one another. New advent in transportation such as the train, ocean liner and commercial jet, as well as the iconification of cultural artifacts are inextricably linked to the development of accommodation typologies and other tourism infrastructures.
The tourism industry officially got its start on Oahu in 1901, when W.C. Peacock built the Moana Surfrider hotel, and W.C. Weedon secured financial investment to market it to the San Francisco elite. A tourism promotion bureau was formed in 1903, and about 2,000 visitors came to Hawaii that year. The steamship served at that time as Hawaii’s tourism lifeline.
In the mid to late century, planning strategies on O’ahu were the product of an effort to optimize what was an unprecedented swell in the consumption of tourism as a luxury product at scale. Price reductions to travel to Oahu by air, catalyzed a new mid-market model. The Hilton Hawaiian Village opened in 1955 and aligned with the commodification of culture and the iconification of exotica propagated by the film industry at that time.
In examining just these few architectural objects within their historical context, we come to understand how hospitality is interwoven with seemingly disparate commerce and cultures. And perhaps we inquire how might a tourism operation at scale perform when it’s approached, not as an artifact of an imported vernacular, but as a catalyst for community driven, local specific, cross-demographic, financial and social development?
