A night out in Berghain, one of the greatest techno clubs in Berlin and the hardest to get in, leaves plenty of things to think and feel over. Techno sounds, spacious factory building size of an ancient temple (electrical plant in fact), church coloured light through thin windows and half-naked gay guys wearing leather pants and leather belts crossed on their muscular chests, intense sex vibes in the air and the amazing perception difference involving mdma.
I found a nice text which sort of explains it all a bit. It was written by Louis-Manuel Garcia (from an essay "Vagueness and Liquidarity: Solidarity, Belonging, and Ethics on the Dancefloor in Paris and Berlin”, the guy actually is a PhD candidate in Chicago and I envy him about the research object a lot) posted in Slow Travel Berlin.
Berghain: a nightclub that has become an institution of the Berlin techno scene, also taking on mythical proportions in the global techno and house scenes.
The club is in fact a reincarnation of an earlier Berlin nightclub, Ostgut (1998-2003), which was located in the empty Ostgüterbahnhof railway shipping warehouse near the Ostbahnhof S-Bahn/railway station in the Friedrichshain district (in former East Berlin).
Ostgut closed in 2003, the building was subsequently demolished, and the vacant space became part of the property for the multi-use sports and entertainment arena, O2 World, the naming rights of which were bought by mobile telecommunications company Telefónica O2 Germany in 2006.
With some financial support from municipal government and outside investors, Ostgut reopened as Berghain in 2004 in a DDR-era electrical plant on the other side of Ostbahnhof’s railway tracks.[1] The new name, “Berghain,” is a portmanteau taken from the final syllables of the names of the two districts that flank the location: Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain (former West and East Berlin, respectively).
The building in which Berghain is located was built between 1953 and 1954 in the socialist neoclassical style, with alternating pilasters and lattice windows running the height of the building, underlined by a band of rusticated masonry around the base.[2] Although there are essentially three levels to the building, each level has a height of approximately 9 meters (30 feet).[3]
The ground floor includes a relatively small ticket booth area, followed by a large entry hall with a coat-check and an art installation by Polish artist, Piotr Nathan, entitled Rituale des Verschwindens [Rituals of Disappearance] (2004) and composed of 175 1m2 aluminum tiles.[4] The remainder of the floor is dedicated to a bar area and a large darkroom space, reserved for (mostly) male-male sexual play.
Suspended steel stairs lead up to Berghain, the former turbine room, with 18m-high ceilings (60 ft.), a dancefloor that can easily hold 500 people, and seven massive FunktionOne speaker stacks.[5] The second floor also holds two bars, another darkroom, a mezzanine with an ice cream bar, and large unisex bathrooms.
Another set of steel stairs on one side of the main dancefloor leads to Panorama Bar, a second dancefloor located in the former control room of the electrical plant. This space includes a wrap-around bar covered in black rubber, and large-format prints of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, including two from his abstract “Freischwimmer” series, and one of a woman sitting on a chair, naked below the waist, with her spread legs exposing her shaved vagina with pink, swollen labia.[6]
The DJ spins at a table suspended bychains from the ceiling, separated from the crowd by a railing of steel tubing decorated with worn-out dials and needle-meters (left over from the room’s previous life), which also serves as a shelf for drinks. The floor-length windows running one side of the room are covered by mechanized metal blinds, which the lighting technician opens during moments of musical climax to allow the morning sun to wash over the crowd.
I found a nice text which sort of explains it all a bit. It was written by Louis-Manuel Garcia (from an essay "Vagueness and Liquidarity: Solidarity, Belonging, and Ethics on the Dancefloor in Paris and Berlin”, the guy actually is a PhD candidate in Chicago and I envy him about the research object a lot) posted in Slow Travel Berlin.
Berghain: a nightclub that has become an institution of the Berlin techno scene, also taking on mythical proportions in the global techno and house scenes.
The club is in fact a reincarnation of an earlier Berlin nightclub, Ostgut (1998-2003), which was located in the empty Ostgüterbahnhof railway shipping warehouse near the Ostbahnhof S-Bahn/railway station in the Friedrichshain district (in former East Berlin).
Ostgut closed in 2003, the building was subsequently demolished, and the vacant space became part of the property for the multi-use sports and entertainment arena, O2 World, the naming rights of which were bought by mobile telecommunications company Telefónica O2 Germany in 2006.
With some financial support from municipal government and outside investors, Ostgut reopened as Berghain in 2004 in a DDR-era electrical plant on the other side of Ostbahnhof’s railway tracks.[1] The new name, “Berghain,” is a portmanteau taken from the final syllables of the names of the two districts that flank the location: Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain (former West and East Berlin, respectively).
The building in which Berghain is located was built between 1953 and 1954 in the socialist neoclassical style, with alternating pilasters and lattice windows running the height of the building, underlined by a band of rusticated masonry around the base.[2] Although there are essentially three levels to the building, each level has a height of approximately 9 meters (30 feet).[3]
The ground floor includes a relatively small ticket booth area, followed by a large entry hall with a coat-check and an art installation by Polish artist, Piotr Nathan, entitled Rituale des Verschwindens [Rituals of Disappearance] (2004) and composed of 175 1m2 aluminum tiles.[4] The remainder of the floor is dedicated to a bar area and a large darkroom space, reserved for (mostly) male-male sexual play.
Suspended steel stairs lead up to Berghain, the former turbine room, with 18m-high ceilings (60 ft.), a dancefloor that can easily hold 500 people, and seven massive FunktionOne speaker stacks.[5] The second floor also holds two bars, another darkroom, a mezzanine with an ice cream bar, and large unisex bathrooms.
Another set of steel stairs on one side of the main dancefloor leads to Panorama Bar, a second dancefloor located in the former control room of the electrical plant. This space includes a wrap-around bar covered in black rubber, and large-format prints of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, including two from his abstract “Freischwimmer” series, and one of a woman sitting on a chair, naked below the waist, with her spread legs exposing her shaved vagina with pink, swollen labia.[6]
The DJ spins at a table suspended bychains from the ceiling, separated from the crowd by a railing of steel tubing decorated with worn-out dials and needle-meters (left over from the room’s previous life), which also serves as a shelf for drinks. The floor-length windows running one side of the room are covered by mechanized metal blinds, which the lighting technician opens during moments of musical climax to allow the morning sun to wash over the crowd.
