Awarded

Caroline Vogel

Book project 'Hotel Krafft' (diploma work)

Graphic Design

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