Consuming Culture: Tourism and Architecture

This article presents a series of ideas, a mosaic if you will, about the ways in which cultural tourism design conceives and presents places and how these are received and experienced. Starting with how individuals confront culture, where forms of tourism combine religious and social aspects, it considers the impact of those great contemporary equalizers – television and the internet – on the mechanisms through which we interpret the places we visit. Part of this mix entails the experience of place and the narratives presented by the native cultures to the visitor through the expression of (authentic?) places and architectures. These are illustrated by the manifestation of different types of hotels and resorts within four main rubrics: the vernacular resort evoking a sense of place; efficient place of business within the construct of modernism; the supra-real images of twenty-first century globalization; and the reference to the past through historic built environments. This essay outlines a chain of events in touristic architecture: from that of the design and production, its transmission and impact, to the interpretation of the object by architects and writers; and its impact on the receivers – the tourist being amongst them. Aided (or confused) by the new media, tourist architecture at its worst can be an excuse for the indulgence in neo-vernacular kitsch and the formulaic, but at its best may be viewed as aiding a process of self-definition – an exploration of cultural identity.

Keywords: authenticity; couch potato; culture vulture; hotels; mass tourism; media; resorts

Source: Intellect