Klymax nightclub by OMA was designed to be a "sonic sweet spot"

“Whenever you think you’ve seen it, there is another hidden room. Little by little, one discovers, floor by floor, more and more secret spaces – and I am sure I still have not seen all of them, filled with books upon books. It’s almost paradise. I’ve always thought of the König bookshop as a sort of paradise.”

I was thinking about what joy looks like to me on the internet, and I was brought back to earlier conceptions of playful online spaces: Neopets, Club Penguin, Microsoft Paint, those early chaotic days of MySpace, customized Tumblr blogs. When I think about the design of social-media apps today, it’s very clean and very minimalist, lending itself to... See more

We’re very inspired by Factory Records, the Manchester-based label that put out New Order and Happy Mondays and Joy Division. Twenty-four Hour Party People was about Factory Records. In their catalog is release number 51, which is the Hacienda nightclub. The idea of a record label dropping a club as one of its releases, and it’s in their catalog be... See more

He (Rem Koolhaas, 1995) added that the “pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug,” inducing “a hallucination of the normal.” In other words, the hypnotic quality of ambient content creates a false sense that whatever it presents is a neutral condition, a common denominator, though it is decidedly not.

To help focus and filter our ideas, I created a fictional character—a hedonistic, fifty-three-year-old gourmand and music lover, living and breaking hearts in the South of France—so we could design the public spaces of the NoMad as if they were rooms in his private home. We then held focused meetings to brainstorm all the elements that would make t

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