A Shipwright's Glove Turned Inside Out

architects Damir Rako, Eugen Širola
project Disco Club Discovery, Split, Croatia
written by Jasna Gluić

 

What do discos – those unique nightlife spaces of the seventies, the golden age of disco music, with their glamorously-lit dance floors – look like today? Whatever our first impressions, they definitely do not strike us as abandoned, despised or obsolete. Altered, yes. But many things have changed. Disco music has ceded its throne to electronic dance music and an array of subtypes and variants. At the same time, other types of music and streams have developed, some of which make dancing unfeasible, however hard we try. Even if we have not experienced the atmosphere firsthand, we can still remember the  scenes from Saturday Night Fever which exhibit the supremacy of dancers bathed in the glaring colours of the spotlights and complex lighting sets. By contrast, today’s stars are the disc jockeys with their own posters and artistic names, and they seem to be the only people who can tell apart techno, trance, house, and a gamut of hybrids.