Be my Guest…

Hospitality as Cultural and Spatial Practice

»There is no greater pleasure than surprising someone by giving them more than they expected.«

Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire’s quote captures a fundamental principle of hospitality that has endured across centuries. To be a guest also means placing oneself, for a time, in the care of another, in the hope of being welcomed, into a house, a room, or at a table. Hospitality is therefore not only a cultural but also a spatial practice. It reflects a civilising process shaped by care, social interaction and curiosity towards others. Hospitality always involves a reciprocal relationship between guest and host. A hospitable place allows closeness to emerge without dissolving distance entirely. It does not appropriate the guest, but allows them to retain their own space.

Hospitality is therefore far more than an act of welcoming. It is a cultural practice of arrival, encounter, temporary stay and shared experience. Architecture creates the spatial conditions for this by shaping transitions, negotiating proximity and distance, and mediating relationships between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the private and the public. Hospitality thus becomes a spatial and atmospheric phenomenon. At a time marked by increasing tendencies towards separation, polarisation and ideological division, hospitality can offer a refuge for lived forms of human solidarity. Here, the host is not an individual, but the collective of urban society.

The Master’s studio explores how hospitality can manifest itself architecturally and how its spatial qualities can be translated into contemporary building typologies. Different modes of being a guest, being welcomed, hosted, entertained and accommodated, are translated into spatial programmes that interact within a hybrid building.