[Fwd: Hilton saw his hotels as envoys of capitalism]
Sophia
stn beravta kai blepei tn 0ea (to Xiltos Prk Leiv pavtws exei polu polu
polu kaln 0ea, polu kalutern apo tn 0ea stov purgo tns Nat West)
Hilton saw his hotels as envoys of capitalism
By Jonathan Glancey in London
Were the Hilton hotels an instrument of the Cold War, along with ICBM
missiles, B-52 bombers and the Berlin Wall?
Conrad Hilton, a devout Catholic, thought his chain of sleek
international
hotels could contain the spread of communism by showing Europe and the
Middle East what they had to gain from American architecture, design and
room service, a recently published analysis says.
In Building the Cold War, Annabel Jane Wharton presents an inspired
analysis
of the way Hilton designed and built his hotels and how they exported US
values to countries that in the 1950s and '60s might, and did, swing
from
the capitalist to the communist camp.
Hilton began buying hotels in Texas in 1919. He snapped up the
Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, arguably the world's finest hotel at the
time.
Hilton International was established in 1949. Between then and 1966, the
company built 17 hotels outside the US.
"An integral part of my dream," Hilton wrote in his autobiography Be My
Guest (1957), "was to show the countries most exposed to communism the
other
side of the coin - the fruits of the free world."
In the Christmas 1958 issue of Life, Hilton took out an advert depicting
a
shepherd and his flock looking up into the stars. The text of the ad
catalogues a list of catastrophes that affected the US that year -
"Violent
Peru quake kills 21 ... Russia launches 1.5 ton Sputnik ... Rome stirred
by
communist riot . ... Russ warns US of destruction" - yet signs off with
a
reassuring: "Be not afraid."
Why? Because the Hilton chain was there to supply iced water,
cheeseburgers,
milkshakes, soda fountains and dry martinis.
Hilton hotels, says Wharton, were homes-away-from-home for the upper
middle-class American traveller and showcases for the latest US design
and
technology. They boasted iced water in all rooms, as well as direct-dial
telephones, radios and air-conditioning. Eat your little red hearts out.
This cultural imperialism was reinforced by the siting and design of the
hotels. As Wharton observes, not only were the Hiltons the first overtly
Modern buildings in the cities they colonised, they occupied prominent
sites
and offered all-embracing views. When, for example, you slide open the
floor-to-ceiling glass balcony windows of the Habana Libre, the former
Havana Hilton, the entire city appears below you.
In Athens, US executives enjoyed the kind of commanding views Allied
generals could only have dreamed of as they liberated Europe and raced
to
stop the onward march of the Red Army.
Architecture is a political act. When the 122-metre-high London Hilton
opened in 1963 it was the tallest building in the city, trumping St
Paul's
Cathedral. The Hilton overlooked the gardens of Buckingham Palace; in
fact,
it overlooked the whole of London, and was decidedly sexy alongside its
creaking, clanking local rivals.
The American dream was being dangled in front of the natives of grimy,
monochrome Britain. Would they bite? You bet.
Skidmore Owings and Merrill, who had made their name with the Lever
Building
(1952) in New York, one of the most influential office designs of the
next
20 years worldwide, did a smart Corbusian job on the design of the
Istanbul
Hilton.
The interior, says Wharton, "looked like a photograph from the handbook
of
American Modernism, Hitchcock and Johnson's The International Style."
The Istanbul Hilton, opened in June 1955, was a huge commercial success.
It
also did much to change professional working practices as well as
building
design and construction in Turkey.
Just one Hilton defected to the Reds. This was the Havana Hilton,
renamed
the Habana Libre when Fidel Castro set up his headquarters there in
1959.
The image of bearded revolutionaries lounging around in its glamorous
domed
lobby with their M-1 carbines and copies of Lenin's What Is To Be Done?
is a
haunting one.
Uncle Sam was so upset that although the hotel is now Spanish-owned,
refurbished and bustling with wealthy foreign tourists, American guests
are
few and far between.
By the beginning of the 1970s the Hiltons' political and cultural power
was
waning. In 1988 the chain was bought by Ladbroke, a British leisure
group
that has transformed the hotels into rather fusty places that lack the
cool
elegance of the original designs.
The Guardian