The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
NIGHT FEVER
Celebration of nightclub design and culture comes to the V&A
It can’t have been foreseen how poignant this new exhibition at V&A Dundee was going to be when it was booked for its first and only appearance in the UK. Opening on Saturday May 1, having been pushed back by lockdown from its intended original opening date last October, Night Fever: Designing Club Culture takes us into the international design history of the nightclub – at a time when Covid-19 has now forced the closure of all nightlife for more than a year.
“Nightclubs are so important to the culture, the last few months have demonstrated that,” says Kirsty Hassard, curator of this Scottish edition of the show; a new part of it will illustrate the relevance of design to some of the most famous new and recent nightclubs across Scotland.
“They still don’t know when they’ll be reopening, but they’ll be the last,” she continues. “Museums like ours can reopen, but they’re still going to be closed.”
One aspect of the show, she tells us, will be a LiDAR light detection scan of the inside of Glasgow’s Sub Club, with a soundtrack by
Jonnie Wilkes, DJ with the Subbie’s classic Optimo Espacio night. “It’s poignant to think of them as empty spaces, when people know them as places of life and joy.”
Nightclubs will return one day, but in the meantime this show – which was devised by curators from Vitra Design Museum in Germany, where it was originally seen in 2018, and ADAM: Brussels Design Museum – is part celebration and part education, not a commiseration.
“It’s really the first exhibition to look at nightclubs as centres and total works of design,” says Hassard.
“That means the architecture, the furniture, the graphic design, the fashion that’s worn to them – it’s a total experience. It’s chronological in its structure, so it goes from 1960 up until the present day, and each of the four sections’ focus is on 20 iconic nightclubs at different periods in time and points of geography.”
The exhibition’s story begins in Italy in the 1960s, with an alternative to the stories of the Swinging Sixties and the American Woodstock generation which we hear about so often. Instead, in Italy a group of radical young architects calling themselves Gruppo 9999 designed a nightclub in Florence in 1969 called Space Electronic, which was to be a boundary-breaking new concept in design, live music and theatre.
In the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte de Miami, meanwhile, Bamba Issa took its design from a Donald Duck cartoon and held a DJ booth which appeared to be suspended on a flying carpet. These were just two notable examples of a wave of designed nightlife spaces which swept the country.
“With the boom of youth culture after the
Second World War, life for many people was completely transformed from the late ’50s into the ’60s,” says Hassard.
“Mainly in Rome and Florence, but also in some of the smaller cities, experimental Italian architects were trying to think about how they could push the boundaries and what they could do with architecture, but on a small budget. There weren’t a lot of (architecture) jobs, so a lot of them chose to work in nightclubs and they created these really incredible spaces.
“Then there’s a counter-story to that,” she continues, “which is about the experimentation that was going on in North America at the same time, and the stories of Cyclia and Cerebrum. Cyclia was a nightclub that was meant to be in New York; it was actually designed by the Muppets’ Jim Henson, but it never came into being, it was just a plan for a really experimental space that for whatever reason didn’t end up happening.
“This first section is focused on nightclubs as places where architects and designers could push boundaries and experiment with ideas in the 1960s and early ‘70s.”
The second section, she says, is an immersive installation in its own right, called The Light Inside, which is essentially a silent disco, created by the original exhibition designers alongside lighting and music consultants.
“Obviously one of the main things about nightclubs is music,” says Hassard. “Rather than recreating the interior of any of the nightclubs in the show, they wanted to create this installation that you can walk