Disco architecture: 10 clubs that changed the way we dance, have fun and love

The epitome of disco music in the world, Studio 54 had everything you’d expect from a club: excess, mundanity, exclusivity, white horses on the dancefloor and gigantic birthday cakes. It was opened in 1977 on New York 54th Street, after which it was named. The venue’s former function of television theatre was retained in the spectacularity of the Studio’s interiors, arranged in the record time of six weeks and with an investment of $400,000 by its founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. Like many other venues that made the history of clubbing, the Studio 54 didn’t last very long, shutting its doors for good by 1980 already. However, to crown the disco as the place-to-be of late ‘70s New York was the peculiar mix of common people and faces of the international jet-set, something made possible by the club's ruthless door selection policy that, no matter the grade of fame, was exclusively based on one’s style and attitude. It could therefore happen to hand up having a boogie next to drag queens or personalities such as Bianca and Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, the étoile Rudolf Nureyev, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, Diana Ross and many other stars. After all, its logo by graphic designer Lesser, which referenced a typeface popular during the Roaring Twenties, was a declaration of intent of the renovated Gatsby-style opulence the club aimed to achieve. 

Pacha is one of the longest standing among the world-famed clubs, and a symbol of an accessible and transversal nightlife. It is also a pretty good example of entrepreneurship, considering its franchise ventures including hotels, clubs and merchandising.   Pacha was founded as early as 1967 in Sitges, not far from Barcelona, by the Urgell brothers, Ricardo and Piti. However, it was in 1973 that the club relocated to its historical premises on the Ibiza bay. Back then the island, similarly to India and Marrakech, was a sought-after destination for European freaks and hippies, a status that was mirrored in the carefree spirit that animated the club and that can still be found in Ibiza today, once the summer and the tourists have gone. The celebration of the Ibiza rural life could be traced in the décor of the club, which in its original form resembled a typical Spanish farm featuring simple shapes and off-white tones. The peak in the club’s history, though, can be identified with the first decade of the 2000s, the heydays of David Guetta and of the cherry logo emblazoned on millions of t-shirts sold around the whole globe.  

Many have been the venues that marked the intense bond of Italian club culture with design and architecture. However, Piper Club deserves a special mention for introducing the Belpaese to a new way of conceiving clubbing, already starting from the Sixties. The venue was opened in 1965 in a basement of Via Tagliamento, Rome – where you can still find it now – by entrepreneur and lawyer Giancarlo Bornigia and by talent scout and record producer Alberigo Crocetta, who had long been studying the clubs of the Swinging London. For this reason, Piper brought together live music with dancing, in a scenario made of pioneering light shows and Pop Art installations. Many are the legendary names that graced its stage, including The Who, Pink Floyd, Sly & The Family Stone, alongside many Italian icons such as Renato Zero and Patty Pravo, who both started their career in the venue when still underaged before conquering the charts.  Piper was also one of the first discos to invest on a franchise business model, by opening subsidiary venues in Milan, Viareggio and Turin. The latter was the most interesting of them all, featuring radical design interiors by Pietro Derossi (the same architect behind another cult Italian club, the Altro Mondo Studios in Rimini), Giorgio Ceretti and Riccardo Rossi, and a bill mostly dedicated to art performances, like the one by Le Stelle di Mario Schifano, a band project by the renowned Italian artist that channelled Warhol’s Velvet Underground. 

Berghain’s essence is all encapsulated in its past: an East Berlin power station first, a gay club then. The appeal of the post-industrial setting, with an 18-metre-high ceiling supported by massive concrete pillars, and the freedom and transgression of a club that can turn into a dark room at any time, have made Berghain a mecca for techno lovers. The no photograph policy, its mirror-less toilets, and its uber-strict door selection ran by legendary bouncer Sven Marquardt, then, contributed to elevate the club into a cultural myth, where the accounts of its nights are left to tales and to word of mouth. When one step into Berghain they dive into perdition, only to resurrect, sometimes even after a whole weekend, in one of the hippest neighbourhoods of Berlin. 

Although not as famous as other clubs of the Afro and Funky scene that caused a stir in 1970s and 1980s Italy like Cosmic, Melodj Mecca or the Baia degli Angeli, Woodpecker is no doubt the most fascinating design-wise. The open-air structure conceived by the engineer Filippo Monti, and built in a wooden area between the Romagna coast and the motorway to Ravenna, is a concrete ribbed dome with rhythmic arch-shaped apertures and topped by an oculus. The overall impression is a hybrid of a Bini Shell, the Pantheon, and a Space Age-take of the Brunelleschi dome for Santa Maria del Fiore. The structure, then, stands on an openwork concrete platform built upon a circular water basin and connected to the surrounding area via concrete bridges. The outcome is a game of shapes and silhouettes where radical design dialogued with the wilderness of the nature under the restless rhythm of Afro and Funk vinyl. Abandoned for ages, the dome’s inner surface has been enriched by graffiti from celebrated artist Blu. 

The Haçienda has been more than a club, proving that clubbing – although demonised – can be strongly intertwined with culture, becoming a part of it. The club, opened in 1982, saw the creative, and mostly financial, contribution of some key figures of 1980s British pop culture, like graphic designer Peter Saville, New Order and Tony Wilson, the head of Factory Records – the full name of the club, in fact, was Fac 51 Haçienda, so that the venue was to be intended like one label’s products.
The club had a special bond with Acid House, which between the ‘80s and the ‘90s found in the city – which was nicknamed Madchester – its capital. The sound of this genre became therefore intertwined with the building site-like black-and-yellow stripes defining the interiors of the club designed by Ben Kelly.

The Haçienda hosted several of The Smiths’ gigs and Madonna’s first live performance in the United Kingdom. Following the rise of pills consumption in the country, in 1989 the club was the theatre of the first death by ecstasy overdose. As the press and the Police turned their eyes to the venue, the audience grew in a whirlwind of out-of-control wilderness which culminated in the closure of the club in 1997. The Haçienda, however, left a massive heritage, influencing the careers of many illustrious British acts such as Oasis, Stone Roses, and The Chemical Brothers. According to what its founder Tony Wilson stated years after the end of this venture, the venue closed down with a debt of £18m and a legendary status that still lives on today. 

Blitz was that club night where even Mick Jagger could be turned down at the door simply because he would no longer embody the latest underground youth trends.  
At least according to the tastes of the hosts and audience of the night, which took place in Covent Garden, London historical market area. Despite the fact the club night ran for one year only, from 1979 to 1980 (and, perhaps, especially in virtue of this) Blitz represented a magical, one-of-a-kind space where you could even bump into a young Boy George working at the Cloakroom. The venue was home to an androgynous and DIY style, a stage where the students of London art colleges, like Central Saint Martin’s, could freely display their creativity. The club night initiated the so-called Blitz Kids scene, which contributed to launch the New Romantic subculture and the careers of bands such as Visage and Spandau Ballet.

Founded in 1998 in Hackney, London, Miniscule of Sounds was originally conceived as a performance that ridiculed in its name the way more famous Ministry of Sound club. This is the tiniest disco in the world – as certified by the Guinnes World Record – with its two squared metres dancefloor and height of just 2,4 metres. The club is now conceived as an itinerant venue that pops up around the world in places spanning from Japan to Australia, or cult festivals like Glastonbury. 

The Whisky a Go-Go is one of the most famous venues of Los Angeles Sunset Strip, a pivotal street for the history of Hollywood night life. The club has been so influent on American pop culture to even determine the name of 1960s go-go dancing and of its go-go boots, the footwear used for this type of dance. The Whisky a Go-Go has also been one of the first clubs to ever introduce a DJ booth suspended above the crowd and to host a female DJ. Even more absurd was its Silicon Valley branch in Sunnyvale. Opened in 1965, after a few months the venue changed its to Wayne Manor, becoming a Batman-themed disco under the influence of the unbelievable success of the ABC TV series featuring Adam West as Gotham City’s finest superhero. A similar concept was adopted, pretty much in the same years, by the Batcaverna, a club in Riccione, Italy.

The most international of Italian clubs, yet the most quintessentially Milanese of the international ones. Plastic has been formidable in building a bridge between the Italian and the foreign counterculture, creating a mind-blowing hub for the jet-set and for transgression. Launched in 1980 by the odd couple Luciano Nisi and DJ and creative Nicola Guiducci, the venue was renowned for hosting international creatives when visiting Milan, including artists, musicians, and designers like Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Keith Haring, Prince and Jean-Paul Gaultier, just to mention a few. In its original venue in Viale Umbria, Plastic was composed – on top of its main dancefloor – of a suggestive corridor covered in mirrors and by a club within the club: the Juke Box Hero. Plastic has always been versatile in the music played, from new Wave to House and Hi-Nrg, and has also been a pivotal space for the Milanese queer community, therefore resulting into the perfect stage for the ever-evolving youth culture and its faces.  Its new incarnation is a great example of a renovation of the space which, however, remains faithful both the club's ethos and the concept of its interiors by updating its role within the ever-changing Milanese social geography.