In the Master’s program, the Autumn semester 2025 evolved around the annual studio’s topic of «Permanent vacation», exploring local manifestations of the past and the present of global tourism. In Bessire/Winter’s studio, the students worked with the Grand Hotels of Lucerne. Through small interventions, Jasmin Tietianiec and Silje Aks transformed a part of the Hotel Palace.

The Grand Hotels of Lucerne are the epitome of a frivolous, extravagant tourism significantly colonialising the image of the city. While continuously flourishing, their unreal beauty rests on a financial reality that allows for nearly half the rooms remaining vacant throughout the year, leaving an immense urban energy yet to be explored. Together with the underground youth culture of Lucerne, which acts as an erratic engine of public space and urban life, the studio’s participants aimed to crossbench the grandeur of these large vessels by intersecting the circuits of the cosmopolitan Grand Hotels with the movements of hyperlocal players and organisations. 

By means of an Imperfect Architecture, their perfect and finite spatial composition was transformed into more obscure organisms, in whose Chiaroscuro the never-ending story of the (Under)Grand Hotels unfolds.

Jasmin Tietianiec and Silje Aks write about their project: «Based on historical and spatial findings within the Hotel Palace, the project explores how traces of past social life can be reinterpreted and translated into a new program. In parallel, the project draws from the attitude of the activist organization Bruchscetta as a fictional client and future user. Their way of operating, through occupation, adaptability and the appropriation of overlooked spaces, became a guiding principle for this project.

Through a secondary layer, the project aims to reintroduce a social pulse, allowing new forms of public life to coexist within and alongside the hotel structure. Through minimal interventions and using of already existing spaces, the project is composed by a few architectural elements: a reactivated entrance, a mezzanine bar space, a staircase and a bridge. The project unfolds as a sequence of fragments, offering glimpses without fully revealing itself all at once, introducing a new social layer, while still allowing the Hotel Palace to function as it does today.»