Little Palm Island Resort: Designing Escape in the Florida Keys

For moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere; in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles–Dean MacCannell, The Tourist.In his seminal 1976 book, MacCannell assumes that the desire to escape is associated with the modern condition. However, the urge find the “authentic” elsewhere is not new and has long been one reaction to life in urban and/or mechanized societies. Literally and symbolically, the island embodies an ideal escape destination in the Western mind through its physical isolation from larger land masses, as well as through the myths of “unspoiled” societies. Today, island resorts are often designed to evoke fantasies escape through “primitive” and exotic motifs, even in the congested tourist playground of the Florida Keys. In this paper I explore the relationship between lodging and tourist fantasies of escape through a case study of Little Palm Island in the Florida Keys. The resort utilizes a thatched hut motif which is commonly used for destinations representing “escape”. I will examine how this resort and its island location have been designed to promote the experience of escape while simultaneously providing the familiar comforts of the mechanized world. The resort represents one of the contradictions inherent in tourism: nostalgia for a simpler past exists along with dependence on technologies and contemporary conveniences. These observations are then placed in the larger context of the thatched hut resort’s historical development and the influence of Romanticism on notions of escape as it is associated with island destinations.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8