Hospitality Design - September 2013 - 85

perspectives

radical
innovation
in hospitality award

competition

By Stacy Shoemaker Rauen

OFFICE SPACE
This year’s entrants rethink the traditional hotel
space in commercial settings

Pop-ups are all the rage—exhibitions, restaurants,
retail kiosks, even a hotel in a sea container. So
it’s no surprise that a concept that took the idea
of a pop-up hotel one step further—to occupying
vacant city office spaces—took home the $10,000
grand prize for the 2013 Radical Innovation in
Hospitality Award.
“[The concept] can actually be done and
could work in many markets now. If I had not
seen it done in a similar fashion with a very hip
restaurant, bar, art gallery concept in Berlin last
year I would have not been so open to it,” explains
John Hardy, CEO of the John Hardy Group—
and founder of the competition with Hospitality
Design magazine—who narrowed the pool of
entries down to three finalists with fellow judges
Claude Amar, president, the John Hardy Group
International; Michael Medzigian, chairman/
managing partner, Watermark Capital Partners;
Jena Thornton, managing director, Eagle Rock
Ventures; Simon Turner, president, global
development, Starwood Hotels & Resorts; James
Woods, president and COO, the Bowls; Wing Chao,
founding principal, Wing T. Chao Architect.
As Medizigian says, “[One] theme has been
concepts that are adaptive and can be temporary
in nature providing both customer flexibility
and responsiveness to changes in demand—two
of our three finalists this year, Pop-Up Hotel
and Convergence—could be grouped into this
category. Lastly, and important to me as an
investor, has been a trend where designers work
to solve current problems. These have ranged
from the repurposing of excess real estate assets
such as retail malls—and, this year, vacant office

1+2. Renderings of the
Pop-Up Hotel, designed
to revitalize empty
office space.

space—the reduction of operating costs, and the
repurposing of functionally obsolescent motels.”
Competition was stiff, adds Hardy. “It has
grown significantly since we started. We originally
have around twenty to twenty-five entrants from
the U.S. and a few other countries. This year, we
had over seventy entrants from many countries
all over the world. The complete globalization of
Radical is really striking.”
The three selected by the judges battled it out
for the votes of a live audience during a Global
Allies-sponsored session at the 2013 Hospitality
Design Exposition & Conference (HD Expo) in
May in Las Vegas.
And the winners are…

Grand Prize: Pop-Up Hotel

As young traveling professionals, the international
team of PinkCloud.dk—Eric Tan, Fabian Busse,
Leon Lai, and Nico Schlapps—recognized there

2

wasn’t a hotel that caters specifically to their
demographic. “Our concept came about when
we started thinking about a low barrier entry
to hotel design, and decided that using existing
infrastructure of high rises would be an extremely
rich starting point,” the designers say.
Their idea focuses on the transformation of
empty office spaces—pointing to the fact that
more than 20 percent of such space in Midtown

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