How this reads

One description of a hotel is a compromise. It has to cover the building, the year and the history at once, and it usually ends up covering none of them. Three shorter readings, kept apart, hold more.

The first column asks what the building does once it is dark. The second asks what a year does to it. The third asks what decades have made of it. They are written so that they do not repeat one another: if a fact belongs to the season, it does not appear in the night.

There are no clock times anywhere on this site, and none in the night column either. That column is not a schedule and not a report on a stay. It is about the structure itself, about what is lit, what is frozen, what is shut and what stays outside.

The third column is short where little is published. We would rather write four sentences that hold than pad a building's history with dates nobody has recorded. Where a hotel has a well-documented past, that column is longer.

Before the trip is a single practical line. It is preparation, not complaint: a steep site, a cable car, a terminal to identify, a season that decides what is standing. Nothing in it is a criticism of a working business.

Entry dated gives the month when the sources behind an entry were last opened. It is not a visit date and not a claim about the hotel's current arrangements, which can change after we read them.

The four sections run in reverse: ice first, then casino, then capsule, then art. The reason is the third column. Ice hotels have the shortest possible lifetime and art hotels the longest, so reading in this order moves from buildings that end every spring to buildings that have already outlived several purposes.

The material comes from published sources: hotel and operator websites, architectural and design publications, local press and public records about the buildings and their sites. We do not publish reports on stays, and we do not describe rooms as if we had slept in them.

What is not published here: prices, star classifications, ratings, room counts, availability, booking links, opening hours and paid placements. Nobody pays to appear, and nobody pays to be corrected.

An international guide includes Casino Hotels because four Canadian buildings belong in it on their own terms: exhibition pavilions on an island, a resort cut into a gorge wall, a complex on delta ground, a lakeside development on First Nations land. The gaming floor is not described, not assessed and not recommended. If you want that, this is the wrong guide.