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Project for the New Godet Club, Istanbul Turkey [unbuilt]
Design team: marcosandmarjan
Collaboration: Jia Lu
The New Godet Club is a project done for a private commission in 2003. It is located in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, an area with predominantly European-style nineteenth century housing and the centre of entertainment and nightlife. The Godet is situated just off the main shopping street of Istanbul, announcing itself through the protrusion of the DJ-capsule on the street façade. It is conceived as a new centre for innovative and experimental multi-media activities in the city.
The programmatic organisation of the club into differentiated acoustic areas triggered the concept of a floating vessel; an enclosed chill-out lounge hovering over the noisy open areas of entrance, bar and dancing floors. The mobile and Inhabitable DJ-Capsule works as a ‘look-at-me’ device that disappears in the façade when there is nobody inside. The capsule is like a stretchable façade-suit in which the DJ sits, and from where the whole club is visible. It shares a similar strategic location in the building as the lady’s nook in Adolf Loos’ Moller House in Vienna (1928-29), while at the same time reinterpreting the stretchable features of Michael Webb’s Cushicle project (1966). It is the highest point in the whole bar – a connected and networked chamber that shines in the exterior darkness of the night and disappears in contra-light in the heights of the noisy interior. It is a podium that seems untouchable; a sanctorum from where the DJ co-ordinates the music and the majority of the inner activities. But from the outside it is an exposed and rather vulnerable place. The DJ is here a wall creature that turns the whole façade into an inhabitable, malleable and dynamic interface that reveals to the urban exterior the internal activities of the club.
