SRO : single room occupancy

During August of 1996, I stayed in a series of SRO hotels in New York City leaving a book and diary behind when I checked out of each room. The books that were left in the rooms differ from one room to the other but all contain events and/or situations that could have happened in the very room. Diary entries were left behind between the pages of the books, like bookmarks, to indicate the appropriated passages and to impose my story onto the book's story. SRO, single room occupancy, refers either to an entire hotel or to a room within such a hotel. SRO's are the most inexpensive type of hotel. For social workers the term "SRO" has come to mean a single room occupant - not the bUilding but the person. These cheap single room hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years Nevertheless, they have been the target of an offiCial war within city development, neighborhood gentrification, initiated by people whose concept of "home" does not include the SRO with its accommodations of single rooms or suites, usually without kitchens and often with shared bathrooms. Few, if any, housing alternatives for these reSidents exist. When owners close a building, tenants are lucky if they can find a worse hotel at a higher rate. Myths circulates about today's hotel residents: all are supposedly all friendless, isolated, needy and disabled; all are presumably socially marginal; all are mildly psychotic; all are transients who never live anywhere for more than few months. I knew these myths were not entirely true. After all. I had lived in those hotels for quit a while before I start doing this project.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1997

Author dc:creator

• Shimada, Taketo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dennis Adams.SRO hotel is a valuable cultural alternative to mass media culture and to utopian notions of middle class and homogeneous life for everyone. I was inspired by this alternative life style. And this alternative was an opportunity to explore this situation further to investigate larger culture. Just to live the life I was living when I lived in those places and to let the project emerge. I was reading books and writing diaries, but instead of keeping the books and diaries I would leave them, and instead of staying in one place I would move from hotel to hotel everyday. The end product is a narrative structured by physical, psychological and chronological movement through the city. The narrative takes an injection of a foreign body (urban space and its situations) in order to be constructed. The poetry of now is bred in the public space of the city.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69370

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/69370