Taubman College Assistant Professor Anya Sirota’s Detroit-Based Studio Akoaki Featured in the Vitra Design Museum’s Night Fever Exhibition
The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany features Sirota in their current exhibition “Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today.” The show offers the first large-scale examination of the relationship between club culture and design, from past to present, presenting nightclubs as spaces that merge architecture and interior design with sound, light, fashion, graphics, and visual effects to create a modern Gesamtkunstwerk.
Examples range from Italian clubs of the 1960s created by the protagonists of Radical Design to the legendary Studio 54 where Andy Warhol was a regular, from the Haçienda in Manchester designed by Ben Kelly to more recent concepts by the OMA architecture studio for the Ministry of Sound in London. Professor Sirota’s mobile DJ booth “The Mothership” and other recent works are featured in the exhibition as examples of the contemporary evolution of the typology.
Surface Magazine has reviewed the exhibition in the article “Vitra Design Museum Puts Nightclubs in the Spotlight.” The review mentions Akoaki’s role and contribution to the exhibition,
“We’re also looking at the idea of festivals, and how the club has become mobile. We’re including this project called Mothership, a mobile DJ booth by the architecture firm Akoaki. They’ve built it to focus on Detroit history and support cultural production in the city’s North End neighborhood. Twenty or thirty years ago, it was lively black neighborhood, where artists like George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic would perform. They’re trying to raise awareness among the community to build up the neighborhood, and using music, or club history, as a means to create action.”
Exhibit on view through September 9, 2018.
More at: https://www.design-museum.de/en/exhibitions/current-exhibitions.html
