Martina Hügli
MSc Architecture ETH
Projects
Writing
Info
More Than Hotel
Free Master Thesis
Studio Maria Conen & gta Archive
ETH Zürich
2025
www.morethanhotel.xyz
For generations, people from all over Europe make their yearly pilgrimage to the coast of the Mediterranean. Two years ago, I spent a more extended period in Istria, the northernmost peninsula of Croatia. The City of Pula experienced a 10% population decline from 2011 to 2021. Moreover, the monthly average rent increased to €933, whereas the mean monthly salary remained at €969. Changes that can be linked to the growing amount of tourists visiting the region and city each year.
Karel Teige’s work on the minimum dwelling is interesting in this regard, as it makes a link between hotels and the housing crisis. The need for minimum dwelling, in Teige's words, comes from cities failing to provide opportunities for decent human living. In the case of the Adriatic, tourism has been meticulously planned over the past 80 years, but the planning of dwellings to enable decent human living has remained in the realm of tourism.
62% of tourist nights in Croatia are spent in private accommodations such as Airbnb. Today, 25% of the apartments in the historic inner city of Pula are Airbnbs. They are a vital additional source of income for many inhabitants, so a ban is not an option.
Could we instead use Teige’s link between hotels and housing and combine hotel capacity planning and housing capacity planning in these Airbnb structures? In this model, the "More than Hotel" living cycles are no longer detached but overlayed through infrastructural extensions in the backyards of existing houses.
The project also proposes a central hotel room structure at the headquarters of the former shipyard Uljanik. The shipyard becomes the city wide hotel's central lobby, café, kitchen, dining room, housekeeping and laundry. The former war harbour becomes a protected underwater garden and Posidonia oceanica nursery, while prefab panels for new houses are produced from seagrass and shipyard scraps.
Ultimately, the More Than Hotel counteracts tourism dynamics by bringing lives of permanent and temporary residents in close proximity and on eye level again