CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/19/2013

Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life
The Era of Ginger and Fred

Featured image—a film still from Top Hat, Mark Sandrich's 1935 "envelope-pushing sex farce" starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and set in a London hotel—is reproduced from Grand Hotel, the Vancouver Art Gallery's fascinating and glamorous new study of the evolution of the hotel as "a veritable laboratory of modern life." Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs alongside a wealth of primary source materials like renderings, advertisement, postcards, instructions for the delivery of flowers and management flow-charts, this delightful yet scholarly volume easily traverses from tropical opulence to jet-age relics, from Japanese minimalism to the Las Vegas Strip. One of our favorite titles from the Fall 2013 list.