Diálogos entre el diseño y las artes populares: Hugo Galarza y el diseño de interiores del Hotel Colón Internacional (1966-1968)

The 1960s experienced a modernizing impulse in society, expressed, among others, in hotel design. The modern conception of leisure and the popular arts will interact in search of generating an authentic experience. The hotel became a space where a series of senses and meanings came into play. The synthesis of the arts thus became the field of possibility for “other modernities” (Grossberg, 2012) and complex processes of transculturation (Escobar, 2012). How to read this relationship not only from the architectural point of view, but as an interaction between diverse cultural practices? The emergence of modernization processes in Ecuadorian society as a whole produced cultural change, in which interior design and design - devices that operate in the domain of a sense of the social collective - end up interacting with what is popular from the fields of arts and crafts resulting in hotel interior design that shows how social and cultural practices are in constant change and interaction. The purpose of this work is to describe the particular characteristics of the interaction between modern design with crafts and popular arts, evident in a hotel architecture where the limits between the utilitarian and the sublime dissolve. And, how these characteristics represent, in turn, alternative manifestations of the modern in an era dominated, on the one hand, by modernization without the benefit of inventory, and, on the other, by a search for authenticity and identity as a strategy of resistance.