Dark Design: Tenjune

No room for VIPs at this very important place.

When the doors opened at the Double Seven, the club’s owner, David Rabin, christened it the “VVVIP room for Lotus.” The venue signaled a new nightclub interactivity supported by clear circulatory spaces. It said: “You are in, now you are important; so go where you please.” Tenjune’s owners, Mark Birnbaum and Eugene Remm, have also moved in a creative direction that emphasizes “flow” and minimizes the stasis of private areas (see gallery). Indeed, the basement bar for STK restaurant embodies the punctuated death of the VIP room.

The plentiful nightspots of New York’s Meatpacking District provide potential for what eminent sociologist Richard Florida calls the “scene of scenes”—an area where creative people find stimuli and dialogue with other likeminded cognoscenti. Unfortunately, the area mostly disappoints. Tenjune, however, counters with a club of both high energy spaces for flat-out partying and a (relatively) more relaxed corner for communication.

Tenjune’s ironized stone façade is a subtle choice of faux traditional material, masking the contemporary vibe below. Mark and Eugene’s layout agenda, coordinated by the glossy lines of ICrave Design, first draws visitors into the quintessential meeting point: the bar. This node successfully meshes the crowd.

Mark notes the venue vision required that “there would be no VIP” (socialist words for a club that leaves many behind the barriers upstairs). Management found that celebrities, particularly performers, prefer to be in the mix, interacting with their fans, and on the ”stage” (a small centralized platform of intimate visual access and crowd interaction).

Spin 180 from the stage and the material quality increases as one enters a back area known as the “Marble Room.” More money and more luxury would suggest management’s desire to attract more celebrity and more spending (could this have been originally contemplated as the VIP room?). Yet a counter-lux movement plays itself out in these spaces. The powerful now want the popular power of the circular dance floor. It’s high time to have high times in the Obama oval, while the Bush backroom says goodbye.

Though there remains a strict sense of spatial and social separation in the fortified elevated lounge above the dance floor, countervailing fairness is seen in the everyman’s backroom. Here, oral communication is king, the volume can be decreased, and the party toned down to a tête-à-tête. The creatives have a common place to communicate.

The new generation of luminaries wants to mix with those who want to be luminous. The new VIP is not a person, it is a “very important place.”

Still, the public eye is too fickle to be complacent. Get your photo on the Patrick McMullan wall at Tenjune, and now you can stop the flow. The social drive today in the global club of constant animation yearns for cross-class communication in a place (like Tenjune) where every partier can feel, “ahh, this is my space.”

“Dark Design” explores nightlife spaces through the art of human aesthetics.