Description
From the authors foreword: “Japan in the GDR – My Encounter with Three Japanese Hotels in East Germany” is a project that began with my encounter with the still-existing “Interhotel Merkur (now the Westin)” building in Leipzig (…). Soon after this encounter (…) I learned that this was the first project of the Japanese company Kajima Corporation in Europe, a building that was one of four major turnkey projects. The other three are the “International Trade Center Berlin”, the “Interhotel Bellevue Dresden”, and the “Grandhotel Berlin”. (…) Of these four, I decided to focus my attention on hotels. The reason for this was my interest in hotels as theatrical spaces, often used as settings for films or novels. I also felt a strong attraction to the fact that in various sources on the Merkur, the word “hotel” was often replaced with “house”, as I had been interested in the poetics of the “house” for some time.
