ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the need of a sharpened focus on the ordinary, seemingly insignificant, and low-intensity affects that appear in slow and attentive observations of the built environment. The chapter considers the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as a site that both produces and regulates affects. Looking closely at this building, the chapter develops a critique of two influential and opposite positions on affect in architecture today. Borrowing from Kathleen Stewart’s tentative approach to “ordinary affects” (Stewart, 2007) and Sianne Ngai’s work on “negative affects” (Ngai, 2005), the chapter contrasts six observations from the Bonaventure Hotel lobby with descriptions of architectural details, recruitment ads, salary statistics, and prices for valet parking and custom clothing. The observations underscore that what is at stake in the Bonaventure Hotel is not the affective intensity caused by sudden interruptions or by spectacular form, but the inconspicuous affect environment that precedes this appearance: the humming sound of nothing happening at all. This is not to say that there is no affect, only that it takes weak and ambiguous forms in the Bonaventure Hotel. If the Bonaventure Hotel entices the visitor into consumption, it does so through the moderation of affect, not the celebration of it.
