Heterotopic Spaces
Within the Club Heterotopia project I have designed a mini stairwell party that sits within a larger context of the site building. This party space is a threshold space between one area and another. It is designed for the ephemeral, using an existing site and utilising limited and found materials. It considers ways of entry and movement through a vertical space that is usually used as a means of moving between levels.
…The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.” - Michel Foucault, 2014
The Vertical Rave, Mini Stairwell Party.
Within the project Club-Topia, I had selected the mini stairwell party to create my own design within the larger context of the site building. I became interested in Michel Foucault’s ideas around openness and closure and Bridget Chappell’s thoughts on a Situation in relation to a narrow window of time and space, and, how a group of people can collectively hold a space one minute and not the next.
I mapped these ideas over the existing stairwell and began to notice these unoccupied spaces that I could potentially use within my design, located above each platform.
It is a design for the ephemeral and similarly to Chappell’s rave, finding an existing site and to work with limited and found materials, was a main focus. As it is a found location with found materials there is a level of risk involved which adds to the nature of a rave.
The entrance was another focus where I wanted to add to the discrete nature of a rave and using tarp in a tunnel like manner people would have to find their way through to the rave.
Once you enter the space and go down a flight of stairs there is a boarded up doorway and the lower levels are blocked off with board and tarp. Here is where you begin climbing the scaffolding, however climbing on the structure from any level is also possible.
Club Heterotopia is a project that explores the Kiki scene which traces back to the 1920s ballroom culture, an underground community that emerged in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance as a safe space for queer people of colour. The project also investigates Michel Foucault’s ideas around openness and closure and space and time.
“And if we then consider that the ship - the great ship of the ninteenth century - is a piece of floating space, a placeless place, living on its own, closed in on itself, free in a sense, but fatally delivered to the infinate space of the sea...The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.” Anthony Vidler, Michel Foucault and Pamela Johnston: Heterotopias (AA Files, no. 69, 2014)
