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World Best Clubs
Working for the Weekend
Week End Berlin
Photography: Weekend Club, Betty Myller, Erich Schlegel/Red Bull Photofiles
Office building by day, club by night. Owner Marcus Trojan tells us tales from the 15th floor of an underground club that’s made it to the penthouse We love running a club in this town because… in recent years Berlin has increasingly become the trend-setting metropolis for electronic music. That was partly due to the fall of the Wall because exciting club projects would spring up in empty buildings in the heart of Berlin. The club’s name is a reference to… a Jean-Luc Godard film from the ’60s. But we wanted a name that was playful, that’s loaded with positivity. And what’s better in everyday life than the weekend? We’re located… in a pretty prominent address in Berlin, the former East German tourism ministry. It’s where East Germans used to fill out the applications required if they wanted to travel abroad. It’s the second-tallest building at Alexanderplatz, directly below the television tower. We’re on the 12th and 15th floors, as well as the roof terrace. The first thing you see when you walk into the club is… two sliding doors that open. You walk into a completely normal office building. You walk to the lift and go up with the lift personnel. Suddenly the doors open and you’re hit with the sound of the bass beats. Our idea was to… further develop this improvised feeling, typical of Berlin’s clubs, where you walk into the courtyard of an old building
Week End’s roof terrace makes it one of Berlin’s top summer spots: with views over the heart of former East Berlin, including the trademark silver disco ball that is the television tower
and suddenly stumble onto a cool club in the basement. We built on this underground aspect, but moved it from the basement to the penthouse with a view. Our typical visitor is… between 20 and 25 and into music. They will be wearing skinny jeans, a T-shirt and sunglasses. The typical Berlin style, actually. Some of our regulars on the decks are… Richie Hawtin, Miss Kittin, Paul Kalkbrenner, Onur Özer or Tiefschwarz. We’re one of the three big techno clubs in the city, that’s why we take high-quality bookings very seriously. We’re not too avante garde, but not too shallow either. The inside of the club looks like… Helmut Lang’s design. It was envisioned that way by the architects. Everything
is in black, with shiny surfaces and matt wood and a glass façade. We won Berlin’s architecture prize in 2006. The club’s really full when… we have about 1,500 dancers on the three different floors. We usually start really going at… like everywhere in Berlin, not till very late. I would say somewhere between 2 and 4am. But we’re not a typical afterhours club. That wouldn’t even be possible because the clubbers would have to be out by Monday morning, when the office workers we share the building with arrive to start their jobs. Week End, Alexanderplatz 5, 10178 Berlin, Germany, +4930 24631676 www.week-end-berlin.de
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