Visitors to the Vitra Design Museum can currently immerse themselves in the multifaceted cosmos of discotheques. The “Night Fever” exhibition dedicates a retrospective of the club culture of the past 50 years to nightlife.
Visitors to the Vitra Design Museum can currently immerse themselves in the multifaceted cosmos of discotheques. The exhibition “Night Fever” is a retrospective of the club culture of the past 50 years.
Based on the most important locations, it documents how closely interior architecture and design, light and music, fashion trends and self-staging are intertwined and how style-defining legendary nightclubs were. With photos, videos, plans, models, flyers and, of course, music, a kaleidoscope of the most diverse disco worlds unfolds. The exhibition provides a compact overview, can only touch on many things (which are documented in detail in the catalog published at the same time) – and yet immediately evokes memories of a special lifestyle.
The starting point is the spatial experiments in Italian discotheques in the 1960s. Representatives of Radical Design designed the nightclubs as counterculture spaces for multifunctional performances or with sometimes futuristic-fantastic interiors. The spirit of optimism can be felt in the colorful posters and atmospheric photos as well as in the extravagant seating furniture.
In the 70s, the disco wave quickly developed into its own genre and eventually became mainstream. The dance floor became a place of self-expression, illustrated by the ultimate dance film clip of the time – John Travolta’s You Should Be Dancing. A wide variety of nightclubs emerge: in 1976, the Paradise Garage, a prototype for club culture with DJs as individual sound artists, in a parking garage; a year later, the legendary Studio 54 in New York: the former theater becomes a stage for stars and style icons such as Grace Jones, documented with wall-sized photos. Two superclubs of the 1980s are also presented in the same room: the Palladium in New York, an open-plan cinema converted by Arata Isozaki, whose lighting effects and video screens offered new visual stimuli. And the Haçienda club in Manchester, designed by architect and designer Ben Kelly as a “real-life stage set” in a former warehouse with a cool post-industrial interior. Co-financed by the band New Order, the club is regarded as the birthplace of European rave.
Unused urban spaces as impulses
Berlin offered unusual places for unusual concepts after the fall of the Wall. The raw charm of abandoned spaces was combined with spontaneity and improvisation. The two best-known clubs in Berlin developed into epicenters of techno: Tresor in the former Wertheim department store and Berghain, which has been using an old GDR power station since 2004. The Detroit-based architecture and design studio Akoaki also explores the potential of vacancies and wasteland. Its mobile DJ module in the form of a space capsule – here as a small model in a surreal showcase landscape – refers to the rich club history of the Motown and techno metropolis of Detroit: The Mothership can be placed anywhere and transforms its surroundings into a dance floor. In contrast, the temporary open-air club by London architects Assemble for the HORST Arts and Music Festival brings partygoers together in a light, open steel structure made of scaffolding elements – a reinterpretation of the Elizabethan theater.
In addition to the models and plans, videos of rave events and music from the clubs via audio stations take over the atmospheric part. The evocative power of a club night is echoed in the music and light installation by Konstantin Grcic (design) and Matthias Singer (lighting design): In suspended mirrored walls, thousands of LEDs with rhythmic lighting effects create the illusion of an endless dance floor, carried by the beats of the playlists of the respective club era.
The exhibition Night Fever. Design and Club Culture 1960-today can be seen at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein until September 9.
