A stay in transit

On the 6th of May Hotel Transvaal will publish their Guestbook. It includes articles by experts like Vincent Smit (lector urban renewal). Afterwards city social scientist Arnold Reijndorp and Olof van de Wal (director KEI) with Sabrina Lindemann (artist and project leader of Hotel Transvaal) will discuss the effect of art projects in urban renewal areas like Hotel Transvaal.

Hotel Transvaal is located in the Transvaal disctrict in the Hague. The hotel rooms are scattered across the district in houses due for demolition, in unsold newly built houses, in peoples homes or in future also in temporary facilities on the wasteland areas. When the houses are demolished, let or sold, we relocate the hotel rooms.

Locality
All rooms have been attractively furnished, some by artists, others by local shopkeepers. Hotel Transvaal cooperates with local residents, neighbourhood organizations and local entrepreneurs. This gives our hotel a wide range of facilities. Turkish, Moroccan and Surinam restaurants, fresh bakeries, beauty salons, an ayurvedic massage parlour, bars with live music, hairdressers and several internet cafés. Most shops are open seven days a week, also during the evening. And all of that within walking distance from your room.  
 


Transformation
In the period until 2014 the Transvaal District, will undergo a comprehensive transformation. Some 3000 council houses will be demolished, in their place 1600 new houses will be built, the majority of which will be sold. For quite some time the vista of the district will be dominated by boarded-up buildings, construction sites in scaffolding, empty shop premises and wasteland, all next to the remaining old houses. The social structure of the Transvaal district will change drastically as the old inhabitants move away and new ones come in.
 
The largest hotel in the world
Instead of "writing off" this transition period, mobile office OpTrek commissioned architectural firm RAL2005 (Jan Konings and Duran Doepel) to design the concept of Hotel Transvaal as a means of revaluing districts during their transformation process. Hotel Transvaal avails itself of the surplus of empty locations in the area. Therefore its rooms are not situated in one building, but spread all over the neighbourhood. Rooms will travel ahead of the demolishment. The streets are literally the hallways of the hotel. The local facilities are the facilities of the hotel. The district is the hotel.
 


Vision
With Hotel Transvaal the initiators give their vision for a local and national reconstruction policy. The Transvaal district is not unique. Urban renewal takes place all over the country. This may put an end to the decay, but it also means the end of local history and social structures. Hotel Transvaal fills the vacuum in de transition phase, by revaluing it, by seeking clues to link the past to the future and by showing that areas in transition really have potential.  

Book
At the 'Symposium voor de tussentijd' held on October 15th, publisher SUN/Trancity will present a book on Hotel Transvaal.