Bonaventure Hotel’s spatial disorientation produces real economic failure, marking down all merchandise

Evidence

The descent is dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake. What happens when you get there is something else, which can only be characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, color coding and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather desperate, attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space. I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has been obvious since the opening of the hotel in 1977 that nobody could ever find any of these stores, and even if you once located the appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of architecture failing its users that connects to the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure piece on built environments as worldbuilding.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s interest in built environments that resist human navigation — the hotel as infrastructure that works against its own users.