Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (review)

In 1957, Conrad Hilton wrote in his autobiography that each of his international hotels was "a little America," a "laboratory" where the peoples of the world could "inspect America and its ways at their leisure." Hilton considered his international hotels, particularly those in the cold war trenches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as "bulwarks against the communist threat" (p. 35). When proposing his West Berlin hotel in 1955, he proclaimed: "We have hit upon a new weapon with which to fight Communism, a new team made up of owner, manager and labor with which to confront the class-conscious Mr. Marx" (p. 87).

These quotes and others like them underpin the argument that Annabel Jane Wharton advances in Building the Cold War, namely, that the American Modern architecture of Hilton's international hotels embodied and promoted a language of American hegemony during a tense period of confrontation between opposing political and economic ideologies. This is a fascinating topic, one that integrates architectural, political, and cultural history. Wharton's book disappoints on several fronts, however, particularly with regard to the title's implicit promise to explore the use of a dominant cultural representation of American political economy as a weapon of cold war politics. Wharton's engagement with the cold war as a global conflict is limited; she uses it as a tool of periodization, sketching a struggle between capitalism and communism only in the broadest possible strokes.

The first five chapters chronicle the construction and analyze the siting and architectural program of eight European and Middle Eastern Hilton International hotels. Beginning with Istanbul (1955), the chapters move through hotels in Cairo (1959), Athens (1964), Berlin (1958), London (1963), Tel Aviv (1966), Jerusalem (1974), and Rome (1963). The final chapter engages the hotels as products and agents of efficiency, Fordism, and what Wharton refers to as McDonaldization or, even more awkwardly, as commoditization, a term Wharton uses freely throughout but only explains in the last chapter as a nosedive toward the coopting of spatial formation by mass culture.

With the exception of this last chapter, Wharton repeats a format with each hotel that first describes the city, its centers of civic life, layers of material and cultural change, and the way in which the Hilton inserted itself into the urban matrix and the existing hotel industry. From there she recounts the complex financial and political negotiations that, for the most part, occurred at the highest level of governance and resulted in financial packages that combined host-state funding and Economic Cooperation Administration (Marshall Fund) monies. Finally, in examining the buildings themselves, Wharton paints a picture of an American capitalist bully who imposed a material—and largely technological—representation of the American good life on foreign cultures characterized by varying degrees of Otherness. She reveals an ambivalent relationship with her subject, one that plays back and forth between condemnation and fascination.

Wharton is a professor of early Christian and Byzantine architecture and painting, and she admits to being a historical tourist in a time period that is not her specialty. Having taken on this project, she failed to find and read the recent historical literature on American hotels. Had she done so, she would have found that many of the observations and assertions she ascribes to postwar Hiltons had historical precedents that reached back to the nineteenth century, if not before. Her analysis, influenced by postmodern theory, demonstrates only a superficial engagement with the literature on efficiency, Fordism, the history of technology, or political history. Moreover, she fails to put Hilton's globalization program into a context of other American corporations that were setting up shop overseas.

There is no doubt that these Hiltons were large, visible, and symbolic, but I suspect that what controversy surrounded their development took place within a larger story of budding American capitalist hegemony...