Night Fever: Designing Club Culture, 1960 - Today

摘要

In the late 1970s, the men's fashion magazine Vogue Hommes commissioned the semiotician Roland Barthes to write a critique of Le Palace, a former Parisian theatre that had been converted into the city's most fashionable nightclub. Although at times comically ponderous ('Is not the great raw material of modern art, of our daily art - is it not, in this era, light?'), Barthes' observations of the club were nonetheless enlightening. He reported that the former theatre was not simply a boite, but a synthesis of modern techniques that stimulated an exploration of new sensations, the pleasure of dancing, and 'the charm of possible meetings'. More than mere amusement or distraction, he wrote, Le Palace was 'a whole apparatus of sensations destined to make people happy, for the interval of a night'.1 Indeed, La Palace was part of a second wave of European nightclubs that were part theatre, part playground, and part Utopia. Jochen Eisenbrand, Catharine Rossi, and Katarina Serulus, the curators of Night Fever, tap into Barthes' enthusiasm for the post-World War Ⅱ nightclub as the locus of multiple techniques of modernity. They presented the nightclub as a flexible, participatory and often Utopian space made as much by technology as by its physical architecture. Using architectural models, drawings, furniture, lighting and sound equipment, fashion, photographs, flyers, video, and sound itself, the exhibition examined the development of the nightclub as a designed site and raised important questions about its historical role as an instrument of community and place making, the deployment of technology in immersive built environments and the global history of design.