The Ultimate Drive-In

Like soft-shell crabs when the cara pace comes off, Americans feel naked and vulnerable outside their cars, and much Yankee ingenuity has been expended to make this unnecessary. First came the carhop, with a four-course meal at the rolling down of a window, and the motel, followed by the drive-in movie and the curbside teller's cage. Last month Macy's announced plans for a department store flanked by a spiral ramp to enable customers to park within a few yards of the counter they want to visit (TIME, April 10). And last week San Francisco saw the opening of a $29 million, 1,200-room hotel where the guest can register behind the wheel and drive to his room.

In this newest of the world's 61 Hiltons, guests register at the garage entrance, get their room keys by pneumatic tube from the main lobby, and zoom up the spiral ramp and start looking for their room number when the floor beneath the car matches the color of the key tab.

Designer of this San Francisco Hilton is Architect William Tabler, 49, who has unpinned some 60 major hotels from his drawing board--nine of them Hiltons, with three more Hiltons in the works. San Francisco's antique building codes gave him a rough time, and now that the hotel is finished, there is much head shaking over the look of it--a gleaming checkerboard of glass and marble that has been compared to a white-on-white box of Ralston.

Tabler explains that the checkerboard design is dictated by the fact that the building is braced against earthquakes not only horizontally and vertically but diagonally, and the diagonal girders run through every other square of the checkerboard. "This is the safest hotel in the world," he says. "When an earthquake comes, the people who have been criticizing the outside appearance of the hotel are going to be a lot more complimentary than they are now."

The Australians have gone the U.S.'s automotive culture one better with the Motel-Hotel Shandon in Adelaide. The building overlooks a drive-in movie, features picture windows and bedside loudspeakers for sybarites who would rather catch their double bills from a bed than a back seat.

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