Check-in time

Donald Albrecht has been taking things from hotels -- and we’re not talking about towels.

He has a quirky yellow chair from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (opened in 1922). He has a heart-shaped tub from a Poconos resort. He has a cutaway map of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria from 1937 and a model from the implausibly lavish Burj al-Arab, a sultan’s dream come true on the coast of Dubai.

In all, Albrecht has filled 5,800 square feet of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum with artifacts, photographs, films, speculations and fantasies about hotels. The reason, the curator says, is that hotels make us think, and make us feel, in a way few other structures do.

His exhibition is called “New Hotels for Global Nomads.” And as it happens, the show, through March 2, has arrived at a moment when one of the world’s great hotel cities (66,000 rooms and counting) seems to be full of people thinking big thoughts about hotels.

Some 50 blocks south of the Cooper-Hewitt’s space, in Times Square, the 45-story tower of a new Westin Hotel, clad in as many hues as Joseph’s Technicolor Dreamcoat and bisected by a bending line of sky-bound white light, is stopping New Yorkers and tourists alike in their tracks.

Designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica to mirror the frenetic energy of the urban blocks below, the hotel has been gradually opening over the last few weeks.

“It’s beautiful,” said a purveyor of $10 watches as he stood on the sidewalk across the street one day last week. A French tourist agreed. But others aren’t so sure.

“Is this the ugliest building in New York?” asked the New Yorker in a recent headline. Writing below it, critic Paul Goldberger employed such adjectives as “shrill,” “banal,” “tawdry” and “gaudy” on the way to suggesting that the Westin “makes Times Square vulgar in a whole new way, extending up into the sky.”

Meanwhile, a few blocks farther downtown, about 45,000 of the world’s top hoteliers and restaurateurs are meeting this weekend at the Javits Convention Center in their annual convention.

This year, it’s a mournful occasion, with average room rates and occupancy levels down all over. But this slump follows a decade of remarkable growth: Between 1993 and 2001, the U.S. hotel industry grew from 3.3 million rooms to 4.2 million, with $103.6 billion in annual sales. Only the car and food industries are bigger.

Since the first large-scale hotels showed up in the Eastern United States about 200 years ago and then spread around the world, their shape and contents have both mirrored social changes and fueled romantic daydreams: when London’s Savoy Hotel added electricity in 1889, for instance; or when the Gideons started placing Bibles at the Superior Hotel in Superior, Mont., in 1908; when the Flamingo introduced the casino-hotel concept to Las Vegas in 1946; when the Hilton chain decided to put televisions in all of its guest rooms in 1951.

“I love to do exhibitions that engage people’s everyday lives,” said Albrecht, standing near the Cooper-Hewitt’s entrance on East 91st Street as museum members filed in for the exhibition’s Oct. 28 opening reception. He began to nurse the idea of a hotel show several years ago, he said, when the proliferation of eclectically designed boutique lodgings worldwide convinced him that “the hotel was back as a design laboratory.”

Soon he was gathering string to support his idea of hotels as symbols of globalism, places of business, places of refuge, as addresses where, as British novelist Frederick Marryat once said, “you meet everybody and everybody meets you.”Albrecht, who spent 12 years as an architect and six years organizing exhibitions on film design at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, calls himself a believer in “architecture as a narrative act.”

His previous projects include “On the Job,” a deconstruction of the American workplace for the National Building Museum in Washington in late 2000, and a survey of design work by Charles and Ray Eames that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in early 2000.

His work on the hotel show began in January 2001. Collecting photographs, models, film clips and artifacts, and then commissioning artists, he pulled together about three dozen projects.

About a third of them represent real hotels, a third represent speculative hotels proposed by architects and another third are interpretations by artists and photographers, some literal (like the documentary photographs of Las Vegas), some off the wall (like the illustrated account from artist Sophie Calle, who 19 years ago took a job as a hotel maid in Venice and covertly photographed and took notes in the dirty rooms to which she was assigned. The hotel was unnamed; museum officials note that the artist was fired after two weeks.)

On one monitor, an odd little Spike Jonze-directed video of Christopher Walken runs in an endless loop. Walken, looking like a latter-day Willy Loman, enters a deserted and sepulchral business hotel (the downtown Los Angeles Marriott, in fact) with his suitcase, then is seized by the rhythm of a Fatboy Slim tune and, in an eerie echo of Gene Kelly dances across the lobby, up the escalator and even through the atrium air.

The freewheeling exhibition also offers glimpses of urban hotels, hotels “on the move” (artist Vito Acconci proposes a car whose body unfolds upward, transforming it by night into a mini-skyscraper with a four-level bunk bed), hotels as global business, natural hotels and fantasy hotels.

One exhibit shows the Hotel, in Lucerne, Switzerland, where architect Jean Nouvel has placed oversized movie stills of sensual moments (from Federico Fellini to David Lynch) on the ceilings of all 25 rooms.

Some of these displays are earnest efforts at making a better mousetrap, such as the photos of the Loews hotel chain’s 2000 adaptation of the 1932 Philadelphia Saving Fund Society building. (Loews Hotels is the exhibition’s principal sponsor.)

Other displays, like Diller & Scofidio’s “Hotel InterClone,” are more notional. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio are MacArthur grant-winning architects, but their contribution here (first conceived as an entry in the 1997 Istanbul Biennial) is a never-to-be-realized pitch for an “InterClone” hotel chain, serving cities from Tijuana to Ljubljana, Slovenia, with guest rooms of matching dimensions and amenities (one television, two chairs, desk, dresser, two queen beds, two lamps), but fabrics and colors tailored to each locale. Thus you see all the world’s variety reduced to superficial caricature.

Then there’s the Japanese capsule hotel unit, the “habitation module” from the people at NASA, the scaffolding-based “vertical campsite” for temporary placement in an urban park -- something to intrigue just about every traveler and something else to scare that same traveler off.

“I’m a third-generation hotelier. I deeply believe in hotels,” Loews Chairman and Chief Executive Jonathan Tisch told the assembled crowd after walking through the exhibition on opening night.

However, he added, “I’m going to let my kids figure out how to get into some of those bedrooms upstairs.”