Preponderance of the Evidence: Airstream Parks, Bars and Motels

It’s not exactly the very beginning of the year but it’s the end of the beginning. On January 2, Reviewjournal.com reported that Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh, brought to Santa Fe by Creative Santa Fe for a talk about Las Vegas (NV) last year, when AdobeAirstream was in France, wants the some 20 Airstreams belonging to Vegas’s Downtown Project to be part of the world’s “largest residential hotel.”  We don’t want to start rumors but it’s certainly true that this magazine, AdobeAirstream, has twice shown up in an Airstream or a Spartan at destinations including SITE Santa Fe’s first SITElines biennial, and Minneapolis Institute of Art’s More Real/Art in the Age of Truthiness. So we know the wisdom of bringing high-design trailers out into the streets.

It’s also the case that a restaurant in Athens has made an interesting interior use of an Airstream. 48 Urban Garden by AK-A is described by Archiexpo as “dreamy garden restaurant.”

And for anyone who might say that hotelier Liz Lambert of Austin has been very much in the forefront of inventive ideas about lodgings and trailers, especially at her El Cosmico in Marfa, it also bears saying that (full disclosure), AdobeAirstream did borrow a Spartan trailer, not an Airstream, for last summer’s project at SITE Santa Fe. Yes, Airstream and Spartan fans are often on either side of a seamed aluminum divide.