Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor

摘要

Neither conventional design history nor design theory, Housekeeping by Design: Hotels and Labor, by Associate Professor of Design Studies at Parsons School of Design David Brody, is difficult to categorize. Blending historical material, media studies analysis, and sociological research methods could have proved disastrous, but Brody's tight focus on the hotel as a designed experience—'a realm of coddling where labour seemingly vanishes' (p. 23)—produced a compelling inter-disciplinary study. Brody begins with Dell Upton's claim 'that architectural historians have been too beholden to a history of style—a fetish for surface' (p. 3). To counter this, he adopts a Marxist understanding of how 'objects, experiences, and environments become fetishized as consumable things' (p. 4). Analysing how and why labour processes are distanced behind the commodity's desirable surface is appropriate for the hotel experience in which concealing work behind gleaming surfaces is paramount.