Presentation:
Hotels that Hail: Commercialized Hospitality, Infrastructures, and an Industry in Lebanon.
Conference:
“ARCHITECTURE ET TOURISME. FICTIONS, SIMULACRES, VIRTUALITES.”Sorbonne. Paris, France. July 2017.

Absract:
Hotels that Hail: Commercialized Hospitality, Infrastructures, and an Industryis structured around the establishment of the Hotel District near downtown Beirut.i This area was marked by a hopscotching of spaces of luxury, financial investments, and hopes put into hotels and the spaces that were housed in/around these structures from the turn of the century until the Lebanese Civil War. The analysis centers on three hotels: The Holiday Inn, the Phoenicia Hotel and The Saint George Hotel. These three structures, like stepping stones of greater height, offerings of pleasures, and circulations of bodies, index periods in the development Beirut: French Mandate (1923), after Lebanese Independence (1946), and the start of the Lebanese Civil War (1975). This paper explores aspects of each hotel (form/structure), each a stone’s throw away in distance, but decades apart in time. I argue that these hotels were where hopes and expectations were housed in real concrete infrastructures and supported through the vicarious beams built through tourism. Beirut became a city marked by huge movements of people, goods, and ideas during this Golden Age of tourism, yet hotels were never just tourist spaces, or simply about hospitality, but were social institutions. These hotels were forms that had a certain “mode of address that hails and constitutes subjects by virtue of that form” (Larkin 2015). As such, this paper explores how these three hotels have blurred public/ private spaces, created new visibilities through conspicuous consumption, and the manner in which tangible infrastructure was connected to building an affective and financial infrastructure for bringing bodies together. These hotels hint at an important process of capitalization, realized in commercialized hospitality, that foreshadowed future conflict. The methods of this paper consider eras of hospitality to explore three dimensions: the frame of a specific geopolitical moment, the form of the built structure, and the figure in the individuals who were present and indexed.

BIO:

Jared McCormickcompleted his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, and a secondary degree in Critical Media Practices, at Harvard University (2016). His research centers on issues of mobility, sexuality/sensuality, and imaginations of place in the Middle East.Currently at Harvard University he is an Affiliate Researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Social Science Fellow at the Graduate Center for Writing and Communicating Ideas, and a Bok Writing Fellow in Social Anthropology.Jared is also the co-director/founder ofmarra.tein, an initiative that encourages innovative thought and dialogue by hosting researchers/artists at a dedicated residency space in Beirut, Lebanon.