ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two hotels used as medical facilities: the NASM Hotel in Rotterdam, which screened American immigrants during the fin de siècle; and the Flandria Palace Hotel in Ghent, which was converted into a military hospital during the First World War, and which featured in May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium. Both the disenchanted functionalism and the magical, atavistic, and fetishistic energies of these facilities were contained in their blank white surfaces. These surfaces imposed a claustrophobic bureaucratic normativity within these spaces and symbolized a disciplinary regime fixated on cleanliness, but they also induced a delirious feeling of placelessness, which Sinclair imagines might lead to transcendence.
