How nightclubs became museum pieces for millennials
In May 1985, the Palladium nightclub opened its doors to a Who’s Who of the New York art world. Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Larry Rivers were all there to check out the new club billed as a successor to Studio 54, the infamous nightspot that had closed in 1980, known for its wild parties and its unforgiving velvet rope.
The two venues defined New York’s night life in the ’70s and ’80s and had a lasting impact on pop culture: Studio 54 as the disco-fuelled hedonist’s playground, and the Palladium as a meeting place for the city’s cutting-edge artists.
The Palladium, designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, features in a new exhibition, “Night Fever,” at the Vitra Design Museum here, not far from Basel, Switzerland. Photographs of the venue’s interior capture Mr. Haring’s giant mural of dancing figures and the banks of television screens suspended from the ceiling.
Through a collection of night life artifacts that includes a scale model of the Berlin superclub Berghain, a piece of the dance floor from the Haçienda, the Manchester club associated with the rise of rave culture in Britain, and a mirrored sound installation in which visitors can listen to disco and techno playlists, the exhibition positions the design elements of nightclubs as central to their role as incubators for pop culture.
“When I think about design, whether it’s in a nightclub or hotel, it’s not so much how it looks, it’s about how it makes you feel,” Ian Schrager, the former co-owner of Studio 54 and the Palladium, said in a telephone interview. “You’re not doing it to help you sell something else, the design is there just to lift your spirits.”
“It’s best if you don’t notice a club’s design,” Jochen Eisenbrand, the exhibition’s chief curator, said. “But it actually broadens the notion of what architecture and interior design is about because it’s to do with creating an atmosphere.”
While Studio 54 and the Palladium feature prominently in the show, it also includes ephemera from lesser-known venues. “There’s an existing canon of which clubs are important,” Mr. Eisenbrand said, “but we also tried to show the different aspects that clubs can be important for.”
There is a display from a shortlived New York venue called Cerebrum. Designed by John Storyk, the SoHo venue was open for less than a year between 1968-1969 but it graced the cover of Life magazine, which called it a “cabaret for the mind.”
It was more a performance art venue than a nightclub: Guests were required to don white gowns and were then led by attendants through an interactive experience that featured 360-degree psychedelic projections. Each evening was different; one involved projected images of snowy New England, complete with flakes falling from the ceiling and hot cider for the guests.
“It was a sort of virtual reality environment, if you will,” Mr. Eisenbrand said. “These early clubs created really immersive environments.”
The Electric Circus in the East Village was another club from this time that blurred the line between a disco and an experimental theatre. The club, which in a previous incarnation was run as the Dom by Mr. Warhol, was redesigned by Charles Forberg and became known as a place where creativity and counterculture collided. A New York Times report from 1967 described how “a model in a purple and silver polka dot jumpsuit sailed through the air in the Electric Circus discothèque Monday night and landed in the arms of a man dressed as a gorilla.”
What was happening in New York during this period also made its way over to Europe. In Italy, a group of young architects were already using nightclubs as testing grounds for their avant-garde designs.