When we think of a club space there are multiple sides to it: the material part (what you see), the social aspect (how people behave, interact and move), and the political aspect (the history and sociology of club spaces). These are all intertwined and the experience of the visitor relies on their coordination. How would you describe the ideal club experience when you look at these aspects?

To some people, a club is first and foremost, a space, the bricks and mortar. To others, the building is secondary to the music and program the club is home to. A third view is that a club is less defined by space and programming, but by its politics, values and aspirations - the ethos.    
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I don’t think there is a single ideal club experience, as my ideal is probably not your ideal. But for me, a successful club experience needs to address all three in harmony.
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Next to a DJ booth, bar, speakers, a dance floor, toilets and a cloakroom, what does a club space need when you look at the material aspects or even the practicalities to create the best club experience? What is often overlooked from a design perspective?

Many people would say that all you need is four walls and a sound system, and that anything else is superfluous. Of course, the music is super important, but we feel like one of the big tropes of modern club experiences is the importance placed on the DJ and what's happening inside the booth versus what's happening outside the booth. In our projects, we try to make the space the star, but a ‘total space’, one that is only complete when activated by people.
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While there is no one-size-fits-all club design or experience, a commonly overlooked element is focal points. Some people like to see, others like to be seen. Create opportunities for both besides a DJ pushing buttons as only the focal point. Add to this nonlinear focal points. Having the DJ as the one and only focus creates a bottleneck which is pretty unpleasant for everyone near and far.

Another aspect is flow and circulation: So many dancefloor experiences are ruined by the careless placement of the bar or toilets. You want a main circulation highway with multiple entry and exit points which is an experience in itself, as well as plenty of diversions to get lost in.

Also important to take in mind from a design perspective is play and interaction. I feel like most clubs are designed with the worst customer in mind instead of the best. Everything is health-and-safety proofed to the max, removing any sense of play and participation and turning the audience into passive consumers. Let people climb on things and create elements that are designed to be played with. Trust people and they will usually appreciate it and take care of each other.

During the Temporary Pleasure workshops you organize in different cities, all these design aspects of a club are the main topic. What does a typical workshop program of Temporary Pleasure look like? Could you guide us through the steps?

It was recently described as ‘a nightclub in three acts’. Act one is the design process from Monday to Wednesday, beginning with an introductory exercise where all the participants individually draw what a club means to them. For some, it's something very spatial like a floorplan or an axon. For others, it can be something more abstract like a diagram, a graphic, or a poem. Afterwards, we cluster the ideas and identify themes that become threads running through the rest of the workshop.
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The second part of Monday is made up of lectures, presentations, and site research. By the end of the day we identify the group's ‘notion’, and agree on a design objective or question which becomes the driving force behind the rest of the week.

Over the next couple of days, we explore different answers or approaches to the design question. By Wednesday each group presents a separate solution and the winning ideas are translated into the final design.

Act two is the build on Thursday and Friday. This is the most intense part of the workshop requiring a huge amount of energy from everyone, but it’s also the most fulfilling, working together to realise the fantasy you’ve designed as a group.

Act three is the party on Saturday, where we open our ephemeral club to the audience for one night. There's always a suspense and uncertainty over how this vision we’ve all been slaving over together will be understood by a visitor, and finding out is part of the fun. It’s also a big cathartic moment for us, seeing the whole group dancing on the structure we’ve designed and built together. You can feel the sweat and love that went into it, and I think that translates to the energy of the party, whether people realise it or not.

Then it's all over and we take it all down, leaving no trace.

How come you started Temporary Pleasure? Were clubbing and architecture two individual interests you decided to merge?

I was a club baby, my family’s business was a club in the west of Ireland from 1989 till 2020. By the time I was twenty-five, I’d already worked in a club for ten years. At the same time, I always had an interest in architecture and DIY, organising queer raves and building temporary club spaces with my friends in Ireland. Temporary Pleasure started in part as a frustration with traditional clubs and in part as a fantasy about a space that existed somewhere between a constructed club and a rave, combining elements of both and eschewing their respective limitations. Imagine a club that only exists in a certain place at a certain moment, for a few weeks or just a night, before it changes shape and location again.
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Could you tell us about the current state of Ireland’s nightlife?

Ireland has some of the most restrictive and outdated nightlife licensing in the world, with the current laws in place since the 1930s. Clubs are forced to close at 2:30 am and apply for a special dance licence for every individual night, making it virtually impossible to run a nightclub business in Ireland and more than eighty percent of club spaces have disappeared over the last ten years. On the other hand, groups like Give Us The Night and young club collectives have been making huge strides in demonstrating the enormous appetite for electronic music culture and pushing for the modernisation of Irish licensing, which is promised this year.

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How was Horst Festival, a festival focused on stage designs, an inspiration to you? (I read this in one of your posts)

I discovered Horst in 2017 through Assemble Studio who designed a stage for that edition. It seemed like the first realised example of everything I’d been fantasising about for years and I went by myself in 2018 as I couldn’t find anyone who was willing to make the trip to this weird Belgian architecture festival. The following year I came back and did the Horst architecture lab working on the stage design, where I met Stan who became a partner in Temporary Pleasure and that’s when it became much more real. For all these reasons Horst will always have a special place in our hearts and story and we’ll keep coming back every year.

In the workshops, you also discuss the social and political values of club spaces. What are these? What do participants come up with and agree on most and which values were new to them?

There is no ethos that can be applied to all clubs generally. Each group needs to define their values and rules from within. I feel like the generalised approach contributes to co-opting and virtue signalling we see in clubs now, with every new club night posting the same copy and pasted rules, and everyone becoming desensitised to the actual content.

How do you create a club space that is open and inviting to everyone? Or should a club space not be inviting to everyone per se?

I don’t think it's about being open or closed, but about having a genuine community at its core, not as consumers but as active participants. I don’t believe there is a way to prescribe an ethos to an audience, only for a club to embody an ethos already shared. Most great clubs in history were created by people on the fringes of mainstream society out of necessity or aspiration, whether it is exclusion or countercultural ideals. As clubs grow in popularity and transition from underground to overground, there is an inevitable dilution or shedding of core values. This is part of the reason I don’t really believe in institutional clubs that outlive their originators. I believe in progressive ecosystems that foster turnover and allow each generation and scene to build its own spaces, and then let them die out when new, different, better ideas come along.
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Should a club always be temporary then? In Amsterdam, temporary licences for clubs (De School, Garage Noord) seem to be the rule rather than the expectation. Is this transience of places and experiences beneficial for nightlife?

In our eyes, yes, the whole essence of clubs is to embody and connect with a particular place or scene at a specific moment and time. The longer a club sticks around, the more fixed it becomes and the less it can evolve and do that. But we also appreciate that in the current climate, with clubs disappearing without replacement, we need to protect what we have

In a club, people act a certain way. As you said earlier, people like to climb on things or dance on higher levels, and sort of use the space creatively and instinctively. Within the research of Temporary Pleasure, how do you investigate how people move and act in a club? How would you adapt a club space to this social behaviour design-wise? 

We bring some predefined design, personal tastes and subconscious biases to each design I’m sure. But in general, we try to ensure as much as possible is defined and designed in the workshop by the participants, responding to the needs of that particular scene, program, and site. If we had to identify some trends, there is usually some sort device to protagonise the audience and facilitate the crowd looking at themselves rather than the DJ. Another common one is creating a space to escape from the intensity.

When taking in mind the dance scene, clubs often have a raw, industrial almost even untouched look. They are located in old preferably brutalist buildings or warehouses made of concrete and broken bathroom tiles. Is this under-designing a cultural thing you think? Or does nightlife simply not have the resources to polish it?

Palladium, The Saint, Studio 54, Ibiza… plenty of clubs good and bad have spent a fortune on design. With the popularisation of the Berlin scene in recent years, the raw industrial thing has become a more aesthetic ideal. But where it actually comes from is ephemeral clubs, from loft parties in post-industrial New York, to UK raves in abandoned factories, and the original Berlin clubs popping up in the vacuum after the fall of the wall. There is a certain essential appeal to these spaces, so rich in atmosphere, rooted in the here and now, and designed only as much as needed to make them functional.
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But recently we’ve also been enjoying the y2k club aesthetic... biomorphic forms, all-white interiors, cyber club graphics, and super-saturated colours. Everything comes and goes and it's refreshing to see something different. What I would love to see is a hybrid of these raw and surreal design styles.

We read that you use resourceful materials when designing club spaces. Could you elaborate on this? In what ways are they resourceful?

Working with spaces with a short life-span and often low budgets, it’s important to consider the impact and work with what’s around you without creating waste. Find local, recycled materials, scour second hand/donation websites, use circular materials like scaffolding and construction systems, and consider the afterlife, how the structure or materials can become a tool for someone else who needs them.

In a few weeks, we can lay our hands on the new (and first) Temporary Pleasure book carrying the title ‘Nightclub Architecture, Design and Culture from the 90s to Today’. It is an archive of iconic temporary club spaces from the past. Which of these spaces are your favourites and why?

There are so many that I would love to experience for different reasons. L’Altro Mondo & the Italian radical clubs of the 1960s for their experimental and ephemeral architecture. The gay dance meccas of 1980s New York like The Saint and Paradise Garage for pure unadulterated sleaze. A night at the Hacienda’s peak. But if I had to pick one to be transplanted to today I think it would have to be E-werk in mid-90s Berlin. I fell in love with Martin Eberle’s photos and there’s something stunning about the sexy lighting and atmosphere in combination with the brutal space.

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What are the biggest challenges for club spaces nowadays? How do we overcome these? 

For sure the disappearance of physical spaces for clubbing, as urban property, becomes more and more commodified and financialised. Social attitudes to clubbing as neoliberal puritanical lawmakers tell us that cities and inhabitants exist only to be productive, economic machines. We also exist to enjoy life, be transgressive, and share moments and experiences. But all great club movements emerged out of countercultural aspirations, the will to dance is human and we will keep creating space for it.

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Follow Temporary Pleasure here. And keep an eye on their upcoming book release in April.