Project: New Godet Club

FLOATING VESSEL, NEW GODET CLUB - NGC

Project for the New Godet Club, Istanbul, Turkey (2003)
Design Team: marcosandmarjan. With Jia Lu.

The Godet Club is located in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, an area with predominantly European-style nineteenth-century housing and the centre for entertainment and nightlife. The club is situated just off Istiklal Cadesi, the main shopping street of Istanbul, and is proposed as a new centre for innovative and experimental multimedia activities in the city.

Aspects of 3D convolution have been adopted to develop the programmatic organisation of the club into differentiated areas. The space was considered a vacillating, dense and viscous acoustic volume with a ‘furry’, convoluted structure. A ‘Floating Vessel’, an enclosed chill-out lounge, hovers over the imaginary sound-volume of the noisy open areas of entrance, bar and dance floors. The external presence of this vessel is given by a protruding DJ capsule on the existing street elevation. It penetrates the glassy, transparent and informative façade that acts as an intraface as it partly reveals to the exterior the internal activities of the club, and advertises on the inside events taking place on the outside.

The interior shows a blurry materiality: a translucent, wavy resin membrane incorporates and convolutes the structure, technical appliances, robotic devices and audio-visual equipment. In the entrance floor pressure-sensitive resin cushions, ‘poxels’ (large pixels) change the luminosity and colour saturation according to the variable space occupation. On the dance floor flexible flat screens are sound-responsive and linked to the Internet. 

On the walls a series of monitor vessels react to the air quality, creating an ever-changeable pattern of biological matter. Geometry, materiality and atmosphere attempt to present an alternative to glossy, smooth surface architectures that consider digital space empty and grey-scaled.