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#249356: "A building for the night. Behind Central Station in Amsterdam. It should concentrate all nighttime activities into a second city center, something that is strong enough to attract more and more from the city after sunset. By condensing the usual nightlife into a new kind of spectacle will it be able to keep hundreds of people awake. It combines activities that cannot be exposed to daylight with the idea of a artificial paradise: the wish to let the day go on for 24 hours, to continue the day after sunset under electric lights." |
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Movement through this party-jungle is non-linear, but your night out is. You can't walk directly to the dancefloor once you've entered; that will take you a few hours from the entrance. You will see the dancefloor earlier, but how to get there is unclear and uncertain. Entering the building goes gradually. The first functions are located in and around the station. De newsstands, snackbars, and vending machines on the 5th and 6th platforms and on the Ruyterkade are part of the building. These are the functions where your night out starts, and ends. You continue through a jungle of people, machines, lights, smells, sounds, images, activities. The swimming pool turns out to be a path that leads swimmers through the building, to poolside bars. Or to a waterlift, which brings you to another level. In the hypnodome you're in a jacuzzi under a dome filled with projections. Your clothes are safe in a mobile locker, part of a complex automated tubemail-like system. At every crossing of functions, you can summon your locker and slip back into your clothes. The place is littered with bars and tiny stands selling exotic foods. You can slightly recognize the bars, stands, shops, gambling joints and toilets as old machines, or they form in the spaces in between them. Sega, Heineken, Pepsi, Sushi, XTC, Shark Design, IBM, Columbia, Disney, Tessier-Ashpool, Sony and WaxTrax are all here. You start going dizzy in this maze of machines. In order to relax you sit down in one of the conciousness-machines. The sound from the TV-screen is being mixed with sounds from your surroundings; the computer is fooling around with its equalizer, making you hear new sounds. Sounds that were already there, but you weren't hearing, lost in the white noise. The visor filters the subliminal images from the TV-screen; you recognize the cocktail bar in the floating pumping-station that you see in front of you. Suddenly everything turns black before your eyes, except a tiny little hole, that point your eyes to one of the billions of details you hadn't noticed in this overdosis of entertainment-overkill. You get up from your seat and only now do you feel your senses burn... Downstairs is a tattoo tank, in the more 'underground' area. Here you find coffeeshops (the dutch kind), the gabba-cellar (underneath your feet you see and hear the cars rushing by), and security, including two tiny cells. The basketball court inside, next to the dancefloor, shows superfly players in real life straight from the latest Nike videoclip-commercial. Later tonight, when they're done playing, the fence raises and the court becomes a stage or an extra dancefloor. If you pick someone up that night, you take the elevator directly from the dancefloor to the sleeping cabins on the top floor. For five guilders you control the lock for one hour. Downstairs the party will go on for many hours. Many people will miss the nighttrain home. |
