Forms of Inquiry

You are it, not my daddy.
You are the hotel.
(Danny in The Shining)

This inquiry is concerned with architectural spaces intended for relaxation, leisure and isolation. As an example, the selected images are of the mountainside chalet hotel featured in Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, based on the horror novel by Stephen King.

These images show the Timberline Lodge Hotel upon which Kubrick’s hotel, renamed ‘The Overlook’, was based. For the filming of The Shining the facade of the Timberline was reconstructed in London as a film-set.

In Stephen King’s novel, the hotel manager Mr Ullman describes the hotel’s plan:

The Overlook has one hundred and ten guest quarters. Thirty of them, all suites, are here on the third floor.

Ten in the west wing, ten in the centre, ten more in the east wing… [On the second floor] forty rooms, thirty doubles and ten singles.

And on the first floor, twenty of each. Plus three lines of closets on each floor, and a store room which is at the extreme east end of the hotel on the second floor and the extreme west end on the first. Questions? (…)

Now lobby level. Here in the centre is the registration desk. Behind it are the offices. The lobby runs for eighty feet in either direction from the desk. Over here in the west wing is the Overlook Dining Room and the Colorado Lounge. The banquet and ballroom facility is in the west wing. Questions?

The print based on this inquiry looks at the way in which graphic elements from Kubrick’s The Shining are used within architectural spaces to suggest emotional and mental spaces.

Three different carpet patterns have been selected from various locations in the film: the entrance hall, corridors and room 237.

Shown actual size, these patterns are represented in order of their appearance and significance in the film. Seven captions, also featured in the movie, indicate a lack of sense of time and connection to the world outside this space.

Layered and consciously distorted during the working process, all these elements create a possible construction for a film’s future poster design.