Awarded
Caroline Vogel
Book project 'Hotel Krafft' (diploma work)
Graphic Design
Caroline Vogel
Caroline Vogel
Jury report
The hotel room as time capsule
What is interesting about an old hotel that has seen better days? The visual designer Caroline Vogel shows us in the finals project she submitted at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel. Her research subject was the Hotel Krafft, established in 1873, an institution the whole city knows. Caroline Vogel's challenge was to record research that investigated both material and remembered history from a number of perspectives.
She made an affectionate photographic record of the shabby rooms and their furniture, like a monument conservationist. The worn furniture and sparse sanitary facilities exude the stuffy charm of the fifties, which is when the hotel was last renovated. The designer interviewed eyewitnesses and guests, and researched the hotel in newspaper archives. For example, she records that Hermann Hesse worked on 'Steppenwolf' in the Hotel Krafft in 1924. Caroline Vogel took her research work so far as to collected specimen fabrics herself. She has brought the photographs, drawings and text together in an unusual book that convinces as the result of her visual research because of its rich detail. The hotel rooms, it appears, are time capsules of the fifties to a certain extent, of a kind that scarcely exists elsewhere in Switzerland any longer.
This visual designer has managed to record the chequered history of a hotel using multiviewpoint research in her sensitively made volume. Even though it is just a year since she finished her research, the book already offers a glimpse of the past. The rooms are now being gently renovated, as the hotel has passed into the hand of a charitable foundation.
Peter Stohler
Biography
Born in
1980
Education
Designerin FH in Visueller Kommunikation
