The chapter, in Ana Despotopolou and Vassiliki Kolocotroni (eds) Hotel Modernisms 1890-1950 (Abingdon: Routledge), considers new American-financed international business and tourist hotels of the latter-1940s as transcultural spaces of modernity on the cusp of the jet age. It addresses themes of cosmopolitanism, internationalism, global modernisms, travel and tourism, leisure, pleasure and luxury through analyses centred upon architecture and design history and material culture, building upon research carried out by the author for his 2020 book ‘Jet Age Hotels and the International Style’. It reflects upon the origins of the International Style and its dissemination through hotel architecture, interior design and promotion to represent a new post-war vision of America as a technologically progressive and powerful nation. It also considers how American-inflected international modernism was modified and hybridised to reflect the aspirations of non-American cultural and wealth elites who also formed parts of the new hotels’ clienteles.
The Statler hotel in Washington D.C., the Hotel Jaragua in Cuidad Trujillo and the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico are used as case studies for analyses, the former being a business-orientated hotel with leisure facilities within the USA itself, whereas the latter were tropical resort hotels in the Caribbean, aimed at attracting American and other holidaymakers and intended also to modernise the images of the territories in which they were located.