The process of selecting the clubs for inclusion in the book was fraught, balancing Gillen’s own references and preferences with the realities of available documentation. “It was a combination of taste and curation – what I want to be in there, and then what can go in there,” he says. Because of the architectural focus, no-brainers included Italian clubs related to the Radical Design movement such as Space Electronic, L’Altro Mondo and Piper Club, as well as pill-fueled British nightclubs like the Haçienda, which represented a perfect storm of cultural influence and forward-thinking design.
But Gillen also has a soft spot for what he calls “the rave moments” – often illegal or quasi-legal outdoor parties and warehouse takeovers – which were more difficult to depict. “They’re so short-lived that it’s really hard to access the documentation. Sometimes it doesn’t exist, or sometimes it’s out there but nobody knows who owns the visuals,” he says.
Armed with an analytical approach that aimed to address “the space, the program, and the ethos” as the three key components of a consummate club experience, the book covers significant albeit familiar ground. Temporary Pleasure traipses from the Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable residency at the Electric Circus in New York and the opera house-turned-TV studio-turned disco club Studio 54, to open-air palaces in Ibiza, Chicago sweat dens and muddy raves near British motorways, running the gamut of nightlife as cultural touchstone and commercial project. And yes, this is another chance to read even more about Berghain.
“I definitely knew of the clubs and certain histories of them, well-publicised things,” says Gillen. “But when researching them, I’d be reading like 20 different references and finding new little facts and trivia.” Even a club as famous as New York’s Paradise Garage held fresh stories for Gillen. “The scale of that project was so much bigger than was anticipated. And they didn’t have financing for it,” he says. “So they just developed a small section of the club first. They opened it up to members or family first to fund the rest of it, having these things called construction parties, where they were partying in an unfinished construction site, dressed as construction workers with traffic lights and DIY visuals, looking through a hole in the dancefloor. The flyers for them were like, sexy gay construction workers, and it says ‘Paradise Garage Construction Party #1’ or something.”
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