CLUB SKIN: A GAY NIGHTCLUB

PROGRAM

Basement Bar
Dance Floor/ Catwalk
Office Space/ Storage
Outdoor WC
Hot Dog Stand

DESIGN

My colleague's design was for a theatre and her driving concept was skin. In keeping with her concept I found inspiration from both the outer layer of skin as her's before me as well as circulation. Adapting from her design with the second and third floors I have created multiple levels offering multiple views from which one can see or be seen. The space becomes an “urban theatre” with multi layered platforms, balconies, catwalks, “runway space”, and voids. “Sitting on bleachers, watching the action. Watching becomes everything, ” and “queer men put on a show…validating their existence.” Kate’s rise and fall of the upper floors becomes “the half seen forms of body that match each other in curve and bulge.” The entire building opens up, thus becoming a a celebration of the gay man.

FEATURES

WC: The exterior bathroom of the nightclub is one of the special features of the space. It is enclosed entirely of glass wall with a long track that collects the septic flow beneath the floors and into the septic system. The entire bathroom is a series of these urinals that celebrate one of man’s greatest pleasures. These bathrooms are surreal in their floating nature, in the shape that they take and also very real, “the place where you return to your body- especially in the water-closet.”

Quotations from Queer Space
Bexty, Aaron. Architecture and Same Sex Desire.
New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1997