Sleeping – Alternative Design for Hotels – The winners of the first Non Architecture competition (www.nonarchitecture.eu) “Sleeping – Alternative design for hotels” have been unveiled, showing some absolutely innovative concepts for hotel designs. This was the first of a series of nine competitions, oriented at pushing architects and designers to rethink traditional architectural typologies. In this case hotels – intended as places to host the sleeping function – have been reinterpreted by participants from all around the world. The challenge was to develop an unconventional design for a building to sleep, with absolute freedom of location, scale and program dimensioning. The Jury, composed of Nuno Brandao Costa (Brandão Costa Arquitectos, FAUP university); Inac Eray, (Eray Carbajo Architects, ) Filippo Maria Doria (TU Delft, Winner Archiprix 2014) selected 3 winners and 12 honourable mentions from more than 140 participants. The winning projects showed a variety of approaches, from extremely visionaries solutions, to more practical and business oriented strategies, going from movable hotels to outdoor sleeping, from being hosted in a granny’s house to having a space for drugs-inducted psychedelic dreams.
– Winner: “Find yourself hotel” / Aleksei Snetkov, Katya Shomesova, Anastasia Popova A series of “rooms” scattered across the globe consisting of a white structure that serves as a marker of presence, that dissolves traveling to a “primitive” state but that also is able to connect this action with landscape.
– Winner: “The Retreat at Koonalda Homestead” / Lisa Azhar, DuenEe Chan, Ivan Hage An underground extension of the Koonalda Homestead in South Africa, a space that presents to travellers the opportunity to disappear temporarily from the surface of the earth and relax in peaceful isolation.
– Winner: “Skyline” / Jin Young Chang, Laura Camejo A unique approach by creating a network of cabins suspended 400 meters above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
– Honorable mention: “Grannys functional” / Lluis Martinez Ramirez a new kind of hosting where many grandmothers and grandfathers, seeking affection, welcome young people to to stay in their home.
– Honorable mention: “Ahotel” / Leonard Palm, Thomas Bohne a formal parking garage where the parcels are not intended anymore for parking a vehicle but to park campers, tents or merely, for example, a hammock.
– Honorable mention: “An Anywhere Nights Stay” / Sebastian Murillo Nader, Adolfo Fajardo Bernal, Regina Cortés Garza a new type of hosting that, taking advantage of current aspects of mobility, accessibility, and technology, functions as a disperse system in which all its parts may relocatable according to the situation.
– Honorable mention: “Ballon Dream” / Zheng Cui, Siyang Yu a floating hotel pod hanging on a hot air balloon, which is connected to a camping deck where the single units come down to the ground every morning, and go up during the night.
-Honorable mention: “Hotel Expedition” / Wan Ting Chen, Sheng Zhao a new system and typology which allows the traveler to become an explorer that provides services of not only the traditional hotel but also of a public transportation.
– Honorable mention: “Hotel Mirage” / Anna Barbieri, Anna Hagen a place where you leave all your sorrows, here you can just take a pill, relax and enjoy your stay, choosing from wide range of hotels and dream of them with a specially developed dreaming pills.
– Honorable mention: “Hotelbox” / Camilla Vässmar Frick, Ossian Quigley-Berg it’s a sleeping unit that occupies valuable space in the city converting existing buildings into temporary places to reside.
– Honorable mention: “Hôtell” / Bianca Soccetti, Federica Fogazzi, Elena Balzarini an alternative model that breach the core of hospitality, where big furniture companies will stay open past their working hours and accommodate different type of temporary shelter for those seeking a low-cost,
informal bed.
– Honorable mention: “Rempod” / Brandon Large first conceived in 2025, where average sleep cycles are of 3 hours, this typology derived from the “Float tanks” of the 1950’s and utilizes Sensory Deprivation as a means of propelling users into deep sleep, allowing for mind and body revitalization within a single REM cycle.
– Honorable mention: “The Three Minstrels” / John Chia a business model where the targeted clientele will be required to use his/her skills as a performance or service to the community, given to the hostel as payment and as a model, the building proposes an adaptable tectonic typology.
– Honorable mention: “Troglodyte Living” / Matteo Ghidoni, Jean-Benoît Vétillard a nine thousands year-old city excavated in the rocks where there is no standardization and hygiene-driven triviality in order to substitute the passive-aggressive individuality of tourism with the potential luxury of an unfiltered urban life.
– Honorable mention: “Morpheus Hotel” / Frixos Petrou, Emeline Dussaucy, Sofia Nikolaidou, Matteo Novarino an alternative model for life on earth where the rooms constitute ideal universalities which satisfy all the primary needs and where a new mankind, free from induced needs, can survive with the help of the network.
