Nightclubbing: Nigel Coates in Conversation with Eleanor Curtis

摘要

The first essays of the very first publication of the AA Files (of the Architectural Association, London) in 1982, were on clubs. Architect Nigel Coates, then known as the enfant terrible of the AA school and founder of the group and publication Narrative Architecture Today [NATO] wrote one of these essays, entitled 'New Clubs at Large'. It opens: Ephemeral, gratuitous and hardly ever a serious job for the hard-nut designer, nightclubs are the vaudeville of the city stage. Yet clubs, places of nocturnal entertainment, have always been a social safety valve for turning transgressive forces loose - Berlin in the 30s, Paris in the 50s and now London and New York. Nightclubs anticipate and encourage the spectacle of the self, and in doing so they emphasise many of the more general issues which architecture must include if meaning is to have anything to do with the sensuous faculties of the body.