The Hotel Rehearsal

Presented as part of the 2013 Biennial of the Americas’ Draft Urbanism exhibition, Alex Schweder’s The Hotel Rehearsal explored the changing relationship between Denver’s urban and suburban identities. The installation merged two symbols of mobility and development: the automobile, associated with suburban sprawl, and the elevator, associated with urban density.

Designed as a mobile hotel room, the work reimagined the surface parking lot as a site of temporary possibility rather than empty infrastructure. Instead of replacing an entire lot with permanent development, Schweder proposed a more flexible model: individual parking spaces transformed into provisional rooms, creating the potential for a small-scale, temporary city within downtown Denver.