hotel national

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total 6

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-rw-r--r--entrance-model.webp
-rw-r--r--staircase-model.webp
-rw-r--r--reading-room-model.webp
-rw-r--r--plan-full-ground-floor.webp
-rw-r--r--plan-intervention-near.webp
-rw-r--r--plan-intervention-detail.webp

in collaboration with tamara grabovska, merging the hotel national with the lotte library is based on a deliberately set contradiction. a grand hotel with classical representational architecture meets a left-autonomous library. rather than levelling this opposition, it is staged spatially — as a productive coexistence of two attitudes within the same building.

the intervention concentrates on one corner of the historic, pilaster-articulated volume. freeing a column creates a precisely placed void. two walls are removed, and the raised ground floor is lowered to grade in the area of the incision. this forms a covered outdoor space — carried by a single column — that functions simultaneously as threshold, passage, and address.

the library thereby gains an independent entrance and can operate autonomously within the hotel, without being subordinated to it. the intervention is minimal but effective: a spatial opening rather than a built addition. interior and exterior stand in direct relation without giving up their independence.

the project understands itself as a gentle occupation: not a radical conversion, but a precise displacement of existing structures. through minimal interventions, a place emerges that does not conceal difference but makes it visible.

2026