The atmosphere of the present industrial districts is too full of smoke and dust to permit such buildings; however, this condi tion is slowly being remedied. As cities become organized more communally they become cleaner; more consideration, too, is given to the importance of having plant life near. The well planned city of the future will have many more parks than any city of to-day. In the giant building, trees, plants and flowers would be installed on the terraces and on a promenade just above the business area and running from block to block by means of bridges at the cross streets. The architect sees the city of zoo years hence as having smokeless skies, dustless air, residence and business reunited—business below in glass-enclosed spaces and apartments with terraced gardens above, all buildings oriented for maximum sunshine, light travel by air with landings on towers, heavy travel at street level, arcaded sidewalks one level up for pedestrians, bridges at this level and again at the living level for the convenient movement of pedestrians, machinery mastered to serve the health, comfort and happiness of man in all walks of lif ; order, cleanliness, rational disposition of space, sincere ex pression of structure and materials—the fundamentals of archi tectural beauty.
Originally, hotels were rambling structures with certain com munal rooms—taproom, dining-room, parlour, with small offices on the ground floor and bedrooms scattered round in an irregular and commodious fashion above. Although the large, efficiently planned and highly organized modern hotels lack the domestic charm of their predecessors, the elements involved in hotel plan ning have changed in size and number only. The single dining-room has multiplied into a great banquet hall, a main dining-room, a breakfast-room, a grillroom, and oyster-bar and various special rooms; the parlour has been extended to accommodate conven tions ; ballrooms, galleries, swimming pools, gymnasiums and roof gardens have been added. The modern growth of the hotel has taken place mainly in the United States and may be traced to an enormous amount of business being carried on over an area so large that many commercial salesmen have to travel from place to place and conferences at central points have to be held, and to the modern developments in transport facilities which permits widespread travel for pleasure as well as business.
The modern hotel has to be designed to serve the needs peculiar to the modern travelling man of business. Efficient accommoda tion and time saving arrangements are more important than a domestic atmosphere. On each floor, at the entrance to the ele vators, there must be provided space ample not only for circula tion of the tenants but also for a control desk complete with key-rack and telephone switch-board. Each room must be equipped with a limited amount of closet space, a toilet, tub and shower baths, hollow doors in which suits may be placed to pre vent the valet's disturbing the tenant, inside and outside tele phones, and in the most recent and luxurious even radios. The
main lobby, however, is planned, even at the expense of effi ciency, to suggest an atmosphere of bustle and a full house; the lanes through which visitors and tenants must pass should not be too wide, and convenient seating arrangements should be made; lobbies so planned have an added interest that may be non existent if the disposition of space is the result of planning only for the greatest ease and directness of movement.
As in modern office and apartment buildings, a typical upper floor plan providing the greatest possible number of rooms in the space available, is developed first. The necessity of taking advantage of all outside space for rooms produces artificially lighted and ventilated corridors and halls ; but wherever possible, especially at the points where tenants await elevators, natural light and ventilation should be brought in, for in enclosed spaces an occasional glint of sunshine and even a small vista relieves the prison-like aspect that many hotels have on bedroom floors. Steel skeleton construction, now the accepted form of building nearly everywhere (see ARCHITECTURE), makes possible a more econom ical bedroom floor arrangement than the older types of wall-bear ing construction, with which, of course, there was also a definite limit to the number of storeys possible. The rooms and suites not provided in the upper storeys are much standardized. Since the desirable spaces in a sky-scraper are in the upper storeys, it is not uncommon for the first three or four floors to be occupied by quasi-public rooms, with shops and offices in the lower spaces, although examples exist where some of the public rooms have been put at the top ; on the street level, shops open on both the street and the hotel lobby ; these elements play an important part in meeting the high cost of operation. The heavy overhead expenses of a modern hotel makes operation with less than I,000 rooms difficult. In the United States some recent examples exceed 2,000 rooms, 20 storeys are now customary and a 40-storey hotel has been projected.
The opportunities for exterior design presented are similar to those of other types of sky-scrapers. Zoning regulations, how ever, tending to cut the building back, interfere so materially with the standardized floor plan that the usual practice in the United States is not to carry the building above the permitted height for the straight front wall. This tends to produce a box like form, and the architect, to soften its hard lines, has to resort to cornices and ornament, or develop roof-garden restaurants with pergolas. The entrance generally has a large marquise run ning out to the curb. The lower floors, devoted to large public rooms, give the architect an opportunity to express on the ex terior, in an interesting treatment of the base, the major elements of the hotel.