CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/18/2013

Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life
Vintage Postcards

Featured image, of a vintage motel postcard, 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." In his chapter on hotels and motels in postcards, Peter White writes, "Hotels and motels are notorious as sites in which to temporarily park the decorum, if not the inhibitions, of the everyday. Pleasure, escape, eroticism, exoticism, fantasy, sociability, appetites of various kinds, certain ideas of beauty—you name it, hotels and motels have always been there to indulge the senses on which these desires are focused. Thus, one finds, for example, images of bon vivants cocktailing in rooftop hotel lounges; food—preferably lots of it—served in swanky settings; erotically nuanced swimming pools and exotically themed motel and hotel bars. Brilliantly executed, they must surely constitute the best kitsch money can buy."