Fruits of Futile Flora

This chapter aims to investigate the overgrown hotels on the Mediterranean as decaying organisms, the victims of a violent and systematic privatization. Questioning the politic and poetics of this unplanned growth, the essay uses the hotel both as a contemporary and an archetypal example of what Juhani Pallasmaa believes to be true: that architecture is an extension of nature, to be experienced by all our senses. Horticulture plays an essential role in travel destinations. Obviously, it is used to nurture the event and reception spaces, providing guests with shade and fresh air, especially in the holiday resorts on the seaside. The plants dictate the atmosphere, and continue to do so long after the hotels close their doors. The rooms and halls are becoming forests, disobedient coastal realms, which is quite an obvious disparity to their intended use and ontology. Enriching the landscape, the hotels are becoming a part of it, with colours, scents and sounds coming from the plants as well as from unobtrusive tiny animals. The many materials the building consist of change in various ways - they decompose, corrode and change shape, each one of them with its own peculiar aesthetics. Fruits of futile flora are exactly the experiences of spaces that are being occupied by the irrational, the bodily, and the persistent. The non-deliberate, non-prudent elements of a once charming tourist destination.