The Vitra Design Museum staged Night Fever, an exhibition offering the first large-scale examination of the relationship between club culture and design. Spanning from 1960 to the present, the survey advanced nightclubs as spaces that merge architecture and interior design with sound, light, fashion, graphics, and visual effects to create modern ideal works of art. Akoaki’s contribution, in the form of a diorama-inspired model, stood in for a series of the studio’s recently launched ephemeral and scenographic constructs in Detroit. The model’s representational playfulness was designed to align with the possibility of alternative sites of collective and performative experience, deployed where permanent and legacied venues had gone missing.
NIGHT FEVER
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 2018
Design Leads: Anya Sirota, Jean Louis Farges
Design Team: Jonathan Watkins
Production Team: Morgan Stackman, Lindsey Karasik
This project was made possible with support from Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Vitra Design Museum.