Capsule Hotels

The idea here comes from ships rather than from hotels. Each cabin is a small fitted unit in which the bed, the shelf and the bathroom pod are designed together, so nothing is loose and nothing is oversized. The bathroom arrives as a single moulded piece. Because the units repeat without variation, the building behaves like a piece of equipment, and the corridors read as passages on a vessel.

Cabins repeat along the whole length of each floor, one after another, the same as each other by design. Corridors run straight from end to end with cabins on both sides. Because every unit has an identical footprint, the plan is a simple sequence, and shared functions sit near the entrance.

The hotel stands near the harbour front in central Copenhagen, within reach of the Tivoli gardens, the town hall square and the water. The canal side of the city lies east, and the main station is a walk away rather than a journey.

This is a sleeping place rather than a hotel in the usual sense, fitted into an ordinary commercial building a block from Penn Station. The pods are stacked several tiers high and lit low, and the fit-out was designed to be dropped into a floor that was never built for beds. Nothing about the exterior suggests the use; the address reads as any other narrow midtown block from the street.

Pods stand in stacks of several tiers, reached from open floors rather than private corridors, so a level is one shared room divided by the units themselves. Washing and locker space is communal and sits apart from the sleeping floors. Quiet rooms and daylight space occupy separate levels.

Penn Station is a block away, which puts the long-distance trains, the commuter lines and the subway within a few minutes on foot. The blocks around it are midtown at its most functional: offices, fast food, and pavements that stay busy late.

These are private cabins for sleeping placed inside an airport terminal rather than in a building of their own. Each one is a small enclosed room with a daybed, a desk and a door that shuts, built as an insertion into a concourse that already existed. The construction is lightweight and self-contained, because everything had to be fitted into a working terminal without altering how the concourse operates around it.

One block of cabins opens off the concourse, entered from a single reception point. Because the units are inserted into an existing building, they share a floor plate with shops and gates, and their walls are built for sound rather than for structure. Nothing here has an outside wall.

Everything around it is airport: concourse walkways, gates, the inter-terminal train and the shops that fill the space between them. Downtown Atlanta lies north of the airport, but the cabins sit past security, so the surroundings are the terminal itself.