Arup's Hotels of the Future

With a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary approach encompassing engineering, design, masterplanning and project management, Arup take its responsibility towards the future of the built environment seriously. The iconic structures and major infrastructure projects created by Arup and its partners are going to last, and have a lasting effect on both the environment and the people using them. Arup take this responsibility seriously enough to have a whole department devoted to looking at the future, the Global Foresight and Innovation team. One of the ways they look at the future is through regular multidisciplinary workshops around the globe tasked with gazing into the crystal ball of unknowns and developing possible scenarios in various sectors.

Although the group as a whole is often tasked with looking at the bigger picture of masterplans and large scale buildings, the workshops are structured to drill down from open-ended discussion of possible ‘futures’ to consideration of specific aspects of the built environment. No fewer than three recent workshops have examined the hotel sector in some considerable depth. In both the ‘Business Hotel of the Future’ workshop, held at the Hilton Copenhagen Airport in 2006, and the ‘Urban Resort of the Future’ workshop at London’s Shoreditch House in November 2007, individuals from a range of disciplines really got under the skin of the shape such projects may take in years to come. The latest workshop, held in Tanzania in June 2008, ‘Eco-resorts of the Future’, was the most ambitious workshop yet, staged over two days and bringing together a large group including townplanners, developers, designers, artists, travel professionals, conservationists and of course architects.

Gregoir Chikaher, Head of Arup’s Hotels & Leisure Division, who explained the reasoning behind the workshops. “We gain enormous new understandings and perspectives from the wide cross-section of participants at such workshops. Many of the learnings are then applied subliminally and best practice shared via our group intranet.”
Director of the Foresight & Innovation team, Chris Luebkeman, leads the workshops. He adds: “Change is constant. It’s a given. It’s the context that is variable,” he explains in the opening session designed to put the process into perspective. “We have a responsibility to attempt to predict what the guest of the future will want and the impact that will have on a destination” he continues. In order to achieve this the workshop attendees were asked to consider plausible ‘futures’ and to develop a series of sustainable Eco-Resorts of the Future for a variety of hypothetical personae living twenty years into the future.

A variety of possible key trends were identified by the workshop participants. Guests of the future may expect environmental and sustainable practices in design as standard. Following a principal termed ‘Invisible Green’ environmentally sound features will increasingly be incorporated into the design of buildings rather than being an afterthought as is so often the case today. These design features would neither impact on the visual aspects of the resort nor the guests’ enjoyment. Greenfield locations would allow for sighting for the best self-ventilation and solar energy harvesting. Photovoltaic panels will be incorporated into the fabric of structures rather than added as a ‘second skin’. Grey water recycling services would also be fully incorporated.
As good environmental sense often makes good economic sense a few enlightened hotel owners are adopting these elements already.
The challenge is to get the major hotel developers to think the same way.

Mobility will be of increasing importance in the future – the mobility of the resort itself as opposed to that of the travellers. Examples of this are already seen today in Africa where many national parks only offer 20-year concessions to developers who then have to choose construction techniques that allow the area to be returned to its former pristine state.

An Arup project, Singita Lebombo, a 15-suite eco-resort located on a 15,000-hectare private concession in the eastern south central part of the Kruger National Park in South Africa, is such an example where principles of ‘design for disassembly’ make this possible. The mainly wooden construction (all the timber is FSA rated), was assembled with steel connections that are of uniform size to allow for ease of re-use. Rammed earth was used to keep concrete usage to a minimum. The tents of Whitepod in the European Alps and the yurts of the Treebones Resort in Big Sur, California both illustrate the ease with which resort development can in fact ‘touch the earth lightly”’

Looking at a more technologically oriented future, mobile pods that can be moved seasonally could offer a truly mobile alternative. Roofed with photovoltaic cells and having naturally composting toilets the bigger challenge for such portable structures will probably rest with gaining local acceptance of the benefits of such a transient resort.

Further consideration of the social responsibilities associated with resort development is addressed by the trend towards ethical luxury travel. A plausible future envisages the paradoxical situation of luxury development actually helping the most disadvantaged of the community. Expensive resorts have the advantage of being accessible to fewer guests minimising the impact on the ecological environment whilst simultaneously allowing for support of the social environment through employment, education, etc. Such is the momentum behind this trend that a new marketing platform designed to champion environmentally trustworthy hospitality partners, Nature & Kind, was launched recently. Partners include Abercrombie & Kent, CC Africa, Wild Fitness, Banyan Tree resorts, and Cousine Island.

Eco-villages are a further future scenario for the eco-resort. Far removed from the self-contained resorts we see today, the eco-resort of the future would be self-sustaining. The self-sustaining resort will be a new community, or an extension of an existing community into the hospitality arena. City masterplanning techniques would allow whole communities to adopt self-sufficient food supply chains, energy would be sourced from geo-thermal probes, and the expected longer staying guests would be encouraged to interact in community projects.

The Arup workshops are a fantastic opportunity to see what a disparate group of people, the majority of whom are not from the hospitality industry but all clearly with their own experiences and views of the hotel world, have to say about the future for the sector.

Arup Foresight + Innovation + Incubation
13 Fitzroy Street, London WC1T 4BQ, UK
tel: +44 (0) 20 7755 2794
www.arup.com
www.singita.com
www.whitepod.com
www.treebonesresort.com
www.natureandkind.com