Anyone who knows anything about Berlin’s Berghain will know that clubbing in the dark is fun. Anyone who has been a child knows that bouncy castles are fun. It’s no stretch, then, to assume that chucking the two concepts into a room to duke it out would be a damn fine idea. Welcome to SHELTER.
Swiss architecture practice Bureau A are the brains behind this frightfully fun dose of design, and have a more scholarly description that quotes culturally philosophers like Gaston Bachelard, Paul Virilio, and Beatriz Colomina’s musings on subterranean and clandestine architecture; but there is no escaping the fact that this is a big bulbous blow-up club that would send S&M fanatics into a near meltdown.
Let us drop in on the studio’s press release before we continue: ‘For one night, the black hole of a neat and well organised society is revealed as a potential for distortion, a potential of let-go and provoke, with a slight smile, the unsaid and the sweat. The mysterious black vessel lands in the modern space of a highly engendered concrete vault; a great spatial condition to explore the corners of what is hidden.’
Which is a splendidly verbose way of saying they’ve designed and built the world’s most incredible pop-up discotheque; a pitch-black inflatable bar and DJ booth, exterior and interior made of a black PVC membrane. It is architecture in search of the underground, it is striding into the bowels of a darkened club personified, it is all we don’t speak of, and the memories of what could or should, or should not have been. It is a bloody big inflatable underground disco. It is SHELTER.
Photography, Dylan Perrenoud
