A 54 room, 10 floor extension to an existing business hotel in the centre of Rotterdam.

The ParkHotel began as a family hotel but has since expanded in different directions through the purchase of adjacent villas and the construction of a garden wing. The design for a 54-room extension is the latest addition and uses a public function - the restaurant - as a mechanism to re-orientate the hotel away from the Westersingel (road) towards Rochussenstraat (park).

Above the restaurant is a nine-storey slender rectangular slab, containing six bedrooms per floor. This slab structure of large vierendeel frames was designed to coincide with the hotel room dimensions. Furthermore, the hotel provides urban utility: as slab it cantilevers over the pavement to provide rain protection as an over-scaled bus stop shelter.

The western park façade is punctured by windows that are independent of both the bedroom walls and floor plates behind so that each room has a unique room to window configuration. However a hotel room is also an internalised self referential landscape as a result of guests who arrive late at night / depart first thing in the morning and are sometimes more preoccupied with views to the television than those beyond the window.

The eastern city façade comprises of a narrow corridor with the appearance of verticalised city streets through which the doors to the rooms can be seen. The reflectivity of this glass wall changes according to environmental conditions so that the transparency to the corridor varies.