Hotel Shabbyshabby

In the spring of 2014, as part of the Theater der Welt festival, the architects’ collective raumlaborberlin put out a call for budding designers to create the hotel room of their dreams for the City of Mannheim. An international jury panel selected twenty-two designs, which were constructed in an public workshop in front of the National Theatre and then put up in distinctive locations around the city. Temporary sleeping installations made of wood, sheets of greenhouse glass, and plastic trays sprang up in the port of Mannheim, in pedestrian zones, and in parks, some of them screened off to provide privacy and some not. During the festival theatregoers had the option to spend a night in the experimental dwellings. The publication uses texts and a variety of colour images to document the process of creating HOTEL shabbyshabby and the reactions of guests.