The still surface of the room constitutes four light grey plastered and painted walls adjoined at the corners, one white ceiling, and a floor of dark grey carpet. Fragments of stories pass through the door, each one utterly consuming, contributing towards the entirety of the known universe within.
The Windowless Hotel Room is based upon the recalled memory of three characters, shared over the duration of one night and one morning in an unidentifiable hotel room. For the human subject, the nature of the hotel room encounter can be transient and fleeting. For the hotel room subject, the nature of the human encounter is similarly forgettable; the memory itself belongs to parallel cycles of experience. Revived in the material form of the script, the narrative and the roles enclosed await inhabitation.
Emma Filippides is an architectural historian and designer based in London. With her interest in architecture originating from inhabited interior experience, Emma’s research focuses on domestic space as a means to interrogate wider social, political, historical, and speculative future conditions.
In her initial training as a designer at Goldsmiths, University of London (2015), Emma developed an interest in critical spatial projects and architectural research. She subsequently undertook an MA in Architectural History at The Bartlett (2018), where she specialised in an exploration of material ‘traces’ as an approach towards architectural history, theory and criticism. It was during her time studying Architectural History that Emma took the Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing module.
This play script, based upon a recalled memory of one night and one morning spent in a windowless hotel room, develops a site writing methodology to interrogate the universality and subjectivity of the room in relation to its temporary inhabitants. The three fragmented narratives of this memory converge to form a three act script, comprising stage directions and dialogue. In this scripted form, the narrative and the roles enclosed await occupation by the reader. Manifested physically and graphically across the scripts’ open pages, the reconstituted memory finds physical site here.
The hotels of Argyle Street, King’s Cross, London Good Morning, Midnight (1939) – novel by Jean Rhys A Ghost Story (2017) – film directed by David Lowery
