© Joselito BrionesThis month's issue of VF confused me. I immediately flipped through the pages upon receiving my mailed-in subscription copy, and what did I find? The hotel project that I was working on in New York before I moved to London. I stopped working on it when the owners started failing to pay me - unfunded checks, and after so much trouble trying to collect, a discounted final bill, the works.
And now, one of my favorite magazines has a full page spread calling this hotel "sexy", and a couple more pages of photo spreads and write ups about it. W-Wh-What? At first I thought, how could I NOT have gone through a project that VF would eventually call "sexy"? And then of course, upon reflecting back, I remembered that the idea of the project was sexy to begin with - it was interesting - and that was why I was so enthusiastic to work on it in the beginning. A hotel in an interesting neighborhood of New York, starting to get all the buzz, close to the birthplace of punk BCBG, just north of Soho, and south of East Village, to be opened by the same people who own a happening hotel/club in the meat-packing district.
The work I did (basic floor planning and room layouts), of course, by now would've been totally altered, as is common with any architectural projects. Still I wonder if any of it - hedonism being my guiding idea when working on it - remained. It's burning through my head. Do I want to kick myself? You betcha. Would I have done differently knowing what I know now? Absolutely not.
For one thing, I ask myself, "How did they get away with it?" They were extremely tight with funds (or so they claimed) that they cut at all the not-so-visible proverbial corners. The project was basically a retrofit of a newly built students' dormitory, and the carcass was done - exterior finish and all. The image above, taken with my old cell phone showing the dormitory before it was converted to its current condition, is the only image I have of the project now (I thought it tacky to show you a scan of the bounced check instead). Given, it was the ugliest building in the neighborhood when they started, and they wanted to make it fit to the neighborhood character by making it look like an old brick-faced factory. But the way they had it done! They kept the fake finish, and on top of it, stick flimsy fake bricks. New Yorkers are fond of old utilitarian brick buildings gentrified into a new functional, hip, even sophisticated, use. But if a new ugly building was covered with fake bricks, promote it as authentic, and have VF call it sexy... What's going on?
Let's assume for a while that the VF writer who wrote it completely missed the fake bricks. The interiors after all, at least from the photos in the magazine, really look great. Maybe that's what they meant when they say sexy. Maybe, since I was involved with the project, they have changed the fake plastic mullions of the huge windows into real metal ones. Surely VF wouldn't have praised it if they had stood by the window of a typical bedroom and find that the mullions supposedly holding the glazing together is just a stick-on piece of plastic and can be pulled and flicked on the glass like rubber band?
Or maybe it's just true, what another article in the same issue of the magazine discussed - about media manipulation. The owners of the hotel, who were also owners of the hippest SOHO clubs since the 80's, after all, are extremely media and PR savvy.
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