ABSTRACT
During the interwar, hotels became, more than ever, sites of transit and exchange. Through canalizing streams of luggage and tourists, hotel lobbies generated an intense experience of modernity. In the lobby, hotel guests were forced to capture an era of melting certainties while sitting in their club chair. While the fluidity of hotel experiences or hotels’ historical building styles have triggered numerous reflections, not much attention has been paid to how the lobby acted as a vortex, a place of unending movement. This chapter zooms in on lobbies and revolving doors, exploring how modernity’s turbulent flow was perceived and produced in Vienna, “the city of paradoxes” (Janik and Toulmin 1973). It pays close attention to the writers who linked the disruptive newness of the lobby to the dissolution of a mythical fabric, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
