So, there is a certain scientific explanation of what the experience of the discotheque is, as being this moment in which you can lose yourself, you can lose your subjectivity, you can go into the experience of jouissance. I focused on Europe because even if nobody agrees on where the first discotheque emerged, there is actually no official history of that, no book to check, there are many little histories around from blogs on the internet to people that know something, to little publications etc.
For sure it happened in between the fifties and the sixties somewhere but there seems to be some form of agreement that it first started in Europe and then it moved to America, when disco as a musical genre started there in the late sixties and seventies. I discovered that most of the clubs in the sixties and late fifties appeared around the Mediterranean coast and in a great relation to the phenomenon of tourism. There was actually the idea of having a space and a place where you could lose your body for a period of time, and also the fluctuation of money from the north of Europe, since workers from the more industrialized cities of the north of Europe would come to the south, particularly to the coast, and have the money to invest in going out, in having enjoyable experiences, and people would make of that a business.
And most of the experiments with technology, which were not cheap, but rather quite expensive were taking place in this context. Here is only an image of the main beach, part of the architecture is merged within the landscape, it was made for the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, there was a huge emerging Catalan bourgeoisie, to go there on holiday.
This became an international spot and, in the thirties, already you could find magazines published in four languages, you would have the director of the Herald Tribune, the director of Life magazine going there to spend their vacations.
And there were obviously parties during the night. These magazines were portraying the parties, all these parties had orchestras, or concerts of classical music or more folkloric music, and they were mostly happening in open air. But then later there is the civil war, there is a break and after the civil war there is a dictatorship in Spain, and with this dictatorship, there is an interest in promoting tourism as a form of getting money, of making the country grow. So, in the registry of the city council you can find that they were given the license to have a turntable.
They could have the electronic music there, fine, and that lasted for twenty years, it was refurbished later and became a normal club later but that was the starting point. And to go quickly into that, what is interesting about these clubs is that there was two dance floors and that they had a complete and closed perimeter. They had no windows, they had no contact with the exterior, they were related with the motorway, and they had a parking.
They worked as a one piece of this ecosystem of tourism that was constituted of apartments, hotels, beaches, etc. This was the first nightclub that introduces not only stereophonic sound but also light in a very particular way. This club was the first one where the dance floor had light that would sparkle under it.
The dance floor was made of glass and you could dance on top and this would illuminate you. Again, here there is no connection with the exterior, the plan is quite neat, there is this empty space in the middle, and for the first time also, which will become a normal thing of the typology, you could see rooms for the workers to sleep.
The first discotheques normally had the people working for the discotheque living in house, this was kind of a normal thing for the first clubs that appeared there. This is the first time that I found a plan where an architect identifies the place of the DJ.
In this club, this was the place of the DJ in The guys that established this club were swiss, it was quite common that most of these clubs were done collaboratively, it was never one person behind them, it was normally a group of people. Before this club they had another small beach bar in the north of the coast, it was called San Trop and apparently there is where they tested a bit of these technologies.
Here we have the first example of a built in DJ booth and that was not the only thing. What they tested, which was invented between the DJ and the owner, not even the designer, was all these ceilings full of stalactites that would have lights in them and would sparkle during the night.
That was the main revolution of this club, and in the newspapers of the time when they were reporting about it, it was like- okay, you go there and there is this sparkling ceiling full of lights that blinds you, it was shocking at that moment to have this amount of technology put in place.
He also called in a light designer that was coming from an experimental theatre in Italy and had worked in the Piper in Rome. So, it was a mixture of international people that came together to make this club.
From the exterior its also quite a simple building, no windows, only one door to enter, and no connection at all to the outside thats completely insulated so you cannot hear the noise from the interior. The architect conceived this sculpture as an idea for the club, he said it actually needs to be a complete fluid space that allows the spirit of the new era to come play, something like that, he was a bit new age, at the moment it was already the late sixties, this is And he came up with a plan like this, it was all full of circles and we have the service I guess more towards the perimeter.
There were two dance floors, and again for the first time here, it is clear that he gave a prominent position to the DJ which is this place here, and this is the machinery to amplify the music. So, this is how the interior looked like, it was full of these stalactites also, there was something with the stalactites, everyone liked it, and the lights were also coming from these elements in the ceiling.
This is the interior of the club, it was a bit more busy, we will go onto other pictures later, this is for me one of the crucial drawings which I found in my investigation because it is the first time I saw an architect draw a DJ playing in the DJ booth.
So, this is the DJ booth and there you have the section and the elevation where the DJ could control everything. The funny thing is that obviously he was not calling him DJ, the word didn't exist at that moment, so it was like the control deck of lights and sound. There was an understanding that there was a director of the architecture, and there was a director who would control the atmosphere of the space.
A little bit like Cedric Price Fun Palace, like there is a machinery and someone behind it that can activate and deactivate the atmospheric parameters so people can have fun during the night there. This is the appearance of the DJ booth, at that time they were using both vinyl and magnetic tapes, actually the first steps into DJing was through magnetic tapes, not through vinyl, but at that moment they had already introduced vinyl; and there were some, their names are not well known but there were some famous DJs of this place that were there for years.
But that was not the only thing, obviously at that time they did not yet have commercially produced lighting devices so what they had to do was to design all these devices as Bruno Munari was doing. These are some of the devices they designed for this club, they had different applications, there is many more, they were doing it in collaboration with a light designer company that was external to the core group of designers from there, and what they managed to get was something like that, this ceiling that was full of lights and effects.
They were often making a relationship between the experience of these interiors with cinema, and most of the newspapers were making the relationship with a certain idea of psychotropic experiences.
This is another image of the interior, completely full of people. These are some of the images that I really like that are trying to capture a little bit more of what is actually the interaction of the lights with the bodies, the movements and the position of the bodies in different points.
At the same time the bodies are interrupted by the flashing lights and this provokes a completely different reading of the performativity of the body. There is very clear relationship to these experiences of the discotheque as a non-place, because you are completely disconnected from the exterior, and spaces obviously that work through lighting to reconstruct a certain narrative of time, something that you completely lose track of there.
We talked a lot about light, and we talked a lot about sound, but drugs were also very important in Spain. During Franco times, Spain was not part of many international treaties for drugs, that meant you could go to the pharmacy and basically buy amphetamines for free. These are only some of the brands that you could directly buy in the normal drugstore.
So, all these clubs were fueled by the consumption of these drugs, that were at the time completely legal drugs, that would be consumed by both the club goer and the housewife the same, so it was nothing particular of the club. There have been only two during Franco times, and this was one of them, and they decided that this was a terror attack against the nation and these guys were tried and went to prison for many many years.
So let me come to my conclusion and put forward a bit my ideas behind that, at the beginning I think I was quite naive when I was doing all this investigation and thinking that the discotheque was always this kind of apparatus, that it was a kind of device that was acting as a counterpart to this mechanization.
But suddenly when I started looking more in depth at the emergence of discotheques in the coast, I realized that there was another aspect to all of that, that is this aspect Lefebvre talks about, Henri Lefebvre who is this French thinker, funnily enough, one of the pictures that comes in his book which is a manuscript towards an architecture of enjoyment, that basically analyses what he calls neo-colonization of the Mediterranean coast through the industry of tourism, and there is a picture of Lefebvre in Sitges, the place where the first Pacha started.
So all his theories that were elaborated with Mario Gavila, who is also another sociologist from Spain, they were both working together in France, analyzing what was the impact of this colonization of spaces, and I find extremely interesting because while on the one hand I really believe there is a component in the discotheque that aligns with these ideas, there is another theoretician, who is Douglas Crimp, who was taking some notes about his experience in going out in nightclubs in New York in the seventies.
But I think what you have in there, he says, is a very primitive pleasure, this kind of jouissance. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits.
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