Night Fever. Designing Club Culture from 1960 to Today An exhibition at The Luigi Pecci Center in Tuscany focusing on the architecture of music clubs
Few institutions will reflect a contemporary culture as accurately as will its club culture. From discos to raves, these spaces have acted as magnifiers to put in focus the turbulent times that often rage outside its closed doors. They have pushed and questioned the established notions of fun and togetherness and made it possible to experiment with alternative lifestyles, many times ahead of what society would consider being acceptable. Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Tuscany is putting on an exhibition with this premise in mind, to guide its visitors through the architectural ages of club culture from the 60’s up to today. The exhibition which is produced by the Vitra Design Museum and ADAM - Brussels Design Museum will be shown at Pecci as its only Italian exhibit.
Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 - Today examines the history of clubbing, with examples ranging from Italian nightclubs in the 1960s created by radicals such as Ian Schrager's legendary Studio 54 in New York (1977-80); from Les Bains Douches by Philippe Starck in Paris (1978) to the most recent Double Club in London (2008), conceived by the German artist Carsten Höller for the Prada Foundation.
While in London clubs like Blitz and Taboo, with the New Romantics, a new music style and fashion were born, where among the most loyal customers were designers like Vivienne Westwood. In Manchester architect and designer Ben Kelly designed a cathedral of the post-industrial rave, the Haçienda (1982), co-financed, among other things, by the British band New Order's album sales without them even knowing. Fueled by the rising wave of ecstasy use, acid house, was born and set to conquer the British sound and instigated the dawn of rave culture. House and techno, which was born in the clubs of Chicago and Detroit, can be referred to as the last two major dance music movements to have characterized an entire generation of clubs and ravers. The same also applies to the Berlin scene of the early 1990s, where clubs like Tresor (1991) gave new life to abandoned and deteriorated spaces, discovered after the fall of the wall. The legendary Berghain club, which opened its doors in 2004 in an old thermoelectric power station, also showed that a club scene can breath new life into disused urban spaces.
Since the 2000s, the development of club culture has become more complex. On the one hand, its continuous expansion, appropriated by the commercialization of global music brands and festivals, has caused many underground clubs to be pushed out of urban contexts or survive only as sad monuments of a hedonistic age gone by while ushering in a new age and different age of the clubland.
The exhibition will include a light installation, a silent disc that catapults visitors into the eventful history of club culture. And a select collection of record covers, including drawings by Peter Saville for Factory Records, underlining the important relationships between music and graphics in the history of clubs from 1960 to this day.
