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The Hotel Chameleon and Other Curiosities

The Hotel Chameleon is a habitué of the globalised (super) modern network of transient environments which include airports, shopping malls, hotels, and their subordinate complex of metros, motorways, car parks, hypermarkets, fast food outlets, leisure facilities and business parks. 

They form a virtual 21st century metropolis stripped of historical context and playing into globalisation’s sterilised illusion of space, luxury, disposability, instant gratification and connectedness. 

Within this mega city the vast transient population forever circles a notional center without ever gaining access to its dark heart.

The various elements of this vast global city share a homogeneous architecture designed to eliminate a sense of time and place while facilitating a strict unwritten code of predictable behaviour where a person’s existence is temporarily in a transient state free of emotion and morality which may cause or allow them to take on a different identity.

Reference: Marc Augé - Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995); J.G. Ballard - Airports: The True Cities of the 21st Century