io9
This hotel is one of several temporary structures that Travelodge is building out of stackable, prefab sleep pods. The company rolled out the pods as a stunt last year, suggesting people could use them for outdoor festivals like Burning Man. Each pod is ready for Martian landfall, containing a bed, bathroom, a TV/DVD player, air conditioning, and a coffee pot. Perfect for the terraforming crew! What do they look like when unstacked and left in the open air?
Here's one of the pods:
Travelodge imagines they'll build more temporary pop-up hotels out of the pods whenever the need arises. A rep from the company said:
It could facilitate the creation of hotels on a temporary basis at times of peak demand in certain locations — such as festivals or sporting eventsLike I said: Mars seriously needs these. How else will we keep the Martian Land Rovers company?
Travelodge Building Pop-Up Prefab Hotels [Treehugger]
Comments
deck of cards baby. deck of cards.
what happens during gale strength winds or earthquakes? i for one wouldn't want to in there during those times.
Just add a car on blocks and some chickens and call it home.
That's kind of awesome, actually. I want to put on the back of a truck and just drive around with it.
Or...oooh, no! On giant robot chicken legs! It'd be like a 21st Century Baba Yaga hut!
@braak: Yes!
I used to live in a downtown apartment about that size...
I kinda love the idea, except... Do the windows have like a button that you press to make it impossible to see out of? Cause completely transparent is like a museum exhibit.
@aspiringexpatriate: maybe they're trying to break into the voyeur market.
@aspiringexpatriate: It'd be awesome of they were those LCD windows that you could just switch to "opaque."
@aspiringexpatriate: Buuuuut...now that I look closely, it looks like there are shades at the tops of the windows that can be drawn.
@aspiringexpatriate: Curtains?
This is straight out of Archigram.
[www.dynamicarchitecture.net]
A similar idea, but way cooler.
@braak: Or put it on a barge and float down the Mississippi.
panoptican prison?
@braak: Another io9er I have to thank for pointing me to something new (well, old, but new to me). Baba Yaga: utterly awesome.
This was the idea behind the "modern" (very ugly, very dated) hotel at Disney World in Florida. The rooms were all built off-site as pods with the idea that they could be regularly updated and swapped out (halls and other building essentials were more fixed). Unfortunately, the building settled too much and the pods are wedged in.
@tvjames:
That "very ugly, very dated" hotel known as the Contemporary Resort recently got their rooms renovated. As for the exterior, they are actually adding a new wing to the place. No word if they'll try the pod thing again. Steel frames + heat + humidity probably makes that sort of thing impossible.
I saw something very simialar in R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020.
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