HOTELLO.
Somnia et Labora.
Portable Office / Hotel Room for Das Konzept.

The twentieth century produced vast interiors that were rapidly abandoned: warehouses, factories, military barracks, and lofts built at scale and dismissed within a few decades. These spaces remain structurally intact yet programmatically empty, forming a latent condition within the contemporary city.

Hotello was designed in collaboration with visual artist Roberto DeLuca for the Swiss firm Das Konzept. The project consists of a four-square-meter portable unit conceived to temporarily inhabit these vacant interiors without permanently transforming them.

Packed into a trunk, the unit unfolds into a compact space that integrates the essential conditions for work and rest. A lightweight metal frame supports a translucent, sound-absorbing curtain that defines an interior volume without enclosing it. The surrounding architecture remains untouched; the space is occupied without being appropriated.

The unit can be deployed individually or combined with other modules to form aggregated configurations. Rather than proposing a new typology of housing or office space, Hotello introduces a reversible condition of inhabitation, allowing empty interiors to be used without redevelopment, ownership, or long-term commitment.

Expose - Hotello exposes the condition of urban vacancy produced by twentieth-century development.
By inserting a minimal inhabitable volume into large, empty interiors, the project makes the scale and emptiness of these spaces perceptible rather than concealing them through renovation or reuse.

Mediate - The project mediates emerging forms of inhabitation between work and rest. By condensing both activities into a single portable unit, Hotello translates changing labor conditions into a spatial configuration that can operate within buildings not designed for them.
Mediation occurs through transfer: ways of working and living are relocated into contexts that were previously inaccessible or unused.

Activate - Hotello activates vacant interiors through immediate occupation. Its portability and reversibility allow empty spaces to be temporarily inhabited without altering their structure or program. Activation does not aim at permanence, but at enabling use through minimal spatial means.

Hotello frames inhabitation as a situational act rather than a fixed condition. By operating without permanence, it treats vacancy not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition that can be temporarily inhabited.