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2025-05-11


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a space between rooms of a hotel suite that looks like a mirror

Okay, let me explain. When in LA, me and my friends specifically decided to stay at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel because Fredric Jameson found it to be a sort of unnavigable post-modern maze. How did we find it? Well, the architecture is kind of incredible (there would be more photos if a security guard hadn't told me I could only take photos with a phone) and it is clear they've made it some changes to make it a little easier to navigate, but it is at its heart a bizarre space. There are long sight lines but never directly across the building and most of what you see are balconies you'd have to indirectly reach with a walkway—at almost no point is it possible to make from A to B without first stopping by at C. When traveling to the rooms themselves (which is further warped by glass elevators that switch from inside to outside the building), the four identical towers (distinguished now by a colour and shape that appears regularly but never prominently. We were in green square, which you might have been able to gleam from the green numbers and the green light on the elevator but you probably won't have noticed until you go back because the overwhelming sensation of the Bonaventure is concrete and glass circles) continue the theme by hiding rooms around a concrete pillar. You can't see from A to B but there are always at least two ways to reach it. And with that, you enter the room itself. The room too is filled with odd angles (though as much with sharp corners as gentle curves. The cutout partially visible in the roof here is nature's favourite shape, the heptagon). All of this is to say, what were we greeted with when we got to our room? Two rooms with matching TVs, stands, and perched remotes such as to strongly imply a floor-to-ceiling mirror instead of a passageway. Don't worry, I did make my friends do the Duck Soup mirror thing

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a space between rooms of a hotel suite that looks like a mirror
tags
#architecture/building/hotel/Bonaventure #object/television #place/USA/California/Los Angeles

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