Futuristic design combines travel and hotel stays

A student architect has proposed creating hotels whose rooms can be transported by giant pneumatic tubes – with the guests inside.

Whether it is apartment buildings made up of custom, 3D-printed pods, or a pop-up hotel, architects have been working to revolutionize the hotel experience. Now, Brandan Siebrecht, a graduate architecture student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has devised a futuristic way to combine a hotel stay with travel. Siebrecht’s design for what he calls the ‘Hyperloop Hotel’ was one of two student finalists in the 2017 Radical Innovation Award, a yearly competition for imaginative hotel designs. Siebrecht’s concept links hotels in 13 cities, including Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin, Chicago, and Washington, DC, with a futuristic system of transport via a type of giant pneumatic tube. Guests would stay in modular ‘pods’ that could be loaded onto the transportation system and whisked between cities at supersonic speeds, then slotted into a hotel in the next city.

The design for the hyperloop hotels was inspired by Hyperloop One, a real-life hyperloop being developed north of Las Vegas. The idea was originally proposed by rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard in 1909, and was more recently taken up by Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, who in 2013 wrote a White Paper which suggested using low-pressure tubes as a way to offer fast, efficient, and low-emission travel between cities.

Siebrecht estimates that the hotels would cost around USD 10 million each to build. Guest suites/pods would be constructed out of re-purposed shipping containers, each containing an office, a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. While Hyperloop One aims to have their first transport tube test track up and running in 2020, there are no plans in the works to build the Hyperloop Hotel. However, Siebrecht envisions construction of the hotels could be possible in as little as 10 years. What other transportation and housing innovations might be possible if the hyperloop becomes a reality?