Esteve Castelló, Pol; (2025) The Emergence of the Architectural Genre of the Discotheque in Francoist Spain (1951-1973). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis traces a genealogy of the discotheque as an architectural genre on the Mediterranean coast of Spain between the 1950s and the 1970s. The discotheque is seen as both a symptom and a catalyser of the cultural shift that Europe underwent after World War II with the expansion of the leisure economy, economic liberalism, and consumer society. From a Foucauldian perspective nuanced by its later gender, media, and technological readings (Colomina, Scott, Martin, Preciado), the discotheque is understood as an architectural instrument and biopolitical tool in the development of the tourist industry and its associated process of urbanisation, and in the introduction of new social and governmental paradigms. The architectural analysis is grounded in specific case studies (a series of discotheques in Platja d’Aro, Costa Brava, the ‘capital of leisure’ according to sociologist Mario Gaviria), as the thesis examines how electronic and chemical technologies, some of them developed as military instruments, were repurposed for leisure and introduced into spatial design in the 1960s. Specifically looking at the role of lighting, sound, and psychotropic technologies, the text depicts the emergence of an ‘architecture of waves’, as an instrument for the production of subjectivity. Departing from a Lefebvrian understanding of leisure space, the text traces the relationship between geopolitics, transnational infrastructures and flows, spatio temporal leisure products, perceptual techniques, and systems of production, consumption and representation of the body, to unveil the expansion along the coast of what might be called a ‘super-mass-media-architecture’. The thesis exposes how the discotheque responded to the growing demand for a consumable counter-experience to that of the industrialised urban space of everyday life. At the same time, it demonstrates how the discotheque introduced experiential and aesthetic regimes that supported a displacement from the disciplinary forms of production of subjectivity prevalent during the first half of the twentieth century, towards the fluid, flexible, and body-centred forms of control and production of subjectivity of postindustrialism and late capitalism. The thesis is rooted in extensive primary research, including interviews and research in municipal and private archives, newspaper and periodical archives, image collections and collective archives. The historical evidence comprises mainly unpublished materials that are brought together here for the first time to support the argument of this thesis.

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