Architects give Pittsburgh clubs a facelift

Architect sightings are rare in the buzz and throb of Pittsburgh nightclubs, where "house" is a kind of music you dance to as opposed to something with a roof and foundation.

But should you encounter architects Felix Fukui or Ross Bianco during a night of club-hopping, buy them a drink. They don't mix Chemical Brothers records in the DJ booth or Gray Goose vodka martinis at the bar. But their unique kind of "club mix" - the blending of space, textures and lines - can help make your night.

Fukui's firm, Fukui Architects, designed the Sanctuary, one of the hottest new clubs in the Strip District. Ross Bianco architects created Bossa Nova, an outpost of New York cool in the Cultural District, Downtown.

And when you shoot hoops or gnaw buffalo wings at Dave & Busters at the Waterfront in Homestead, raise your glass to architect Melvin Fain, president of Melvin Fain Architects in Palano, Texas. Fain designed his first Dave & Busters in 1982 and has designed nearly 40 since. Before that, he designed 60 TGIFridays. And as someone whose architectural training in college included courses such as "The Psychology of Leisure," he can tell you that when it comes to designing clubs or restaurants, there's a place for everything and everything in its place.

"All I ever do is visualize myself as a customer," Fain says. "How do I feel standing there, what do I do, where do I go• I don't want to go to a dead end. ... I separated the quiet areas - which are the bar, dining room and billiards - from the loud gaming area. They're two different atmospheres. I put the main restrooms back in the game area to make sure everybody experiences the entire building."

Call it foot traffic, the chase pattern or feng shui - space is anything but the final frontier when it comes to building a new nightclub, whether it's the jazzed up hiptitude of Dowe's on 9th, Downtown, the trance and Top 40 at the four clubs in the Matrix near Station Square, or the pub-like intimacy of Buskers in the Strip District.

"The flow is very important," Fukui says. "If the club is designed poorly, nobody's going to come. If the place is beautiful and there's lines at the bathrooms and no room for the crowd to flow, people won't be very happy."

FLOW PATTERNS

Sanctuary owner Clinton Pohl hired Felix Fukui Architects to redesign the former St. Elizabeth Catholic Church near the corner of Penn Avenue and 16th Street, Strip District.

"I did have a lot of my own ideas," says Pohl, who is part owner of Andora restaurant in Sewickley. "It was my first project of this size. I just thought it would be important to have a partner in the creative process. There are things I might miss that an architect would catch. I like another point of view."

As with any club, the challenge was to reconcile a club's visual punch with practical considerations, such as the placement of bathrooms and bar.

"He knew that one of the worse sins is to have a long line of people to the bathroom," Fukui says of Pohl. "That means they're drinking less and enjoying themselves less. The places where people flow are the front door up to the mezzanine, down to the bathroom, toward and away from the bar. He wanted all those places separated. He was careful to make sure that we understood that all of those were functional constraints that we needed to respect."

Not even the disco-addled, chain-draped Butabi Brothers, played by Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell on "Saturday Night Live," could mistake the Sanctuary for the gridlocked black box clubs of yore.

There's nary a chrome surface in sight. Clubgoers stomp their Doc Martens and Steve Madden platform shoes on the church's original oak floor. Under the octagonal cupola where stained-glass windows remain, lights are flashed on retractable muslin scrims.

The main floor, once occupied by pews, is dominated by a 60-foot fiberglass bar. Fukui and associate Dana Stanik installed the bar to shift focus away from the space formerly occupied by the altar - where DJs now spin techno jazz on Wednesday nights. The bar's soft interior lighting bears a closer resemblance to votive candles than to the control panel of a space ship.

They also added a sweeping steel and fiberglass staircase that leads to a new upper floor that is girdled by a balcony constructed of the same material.

INTIMATE SPACES

Rising real estate prices and an older clientele have caused club owners to rethink the concept of the night club as a cavernous raver space with divebombing lights and bombastic sound systems. Thirty- and 40-year-olds want to enjoy a drink in a place whose atmosphere is less transitory and they can hear themselves think.

Up the street from the Sanctuary, even sci-fi club Area 51 has come down to earth. It officially reopened May 29 as Deja Vu, a restaurant and lounge. In place of bristling aliens and planetarium-style fiber-optics, Deja Vu features softer lines, earth-toned walls, intimate seating areas and Tuscan pillars and archways. Music from the dance floor is audible in case patrons hear a song they want to shake it to.

But it doesn't drown out conversation. Another new touch: a garage-style door that can be raised to connect the outside seating area with the inside.

"We want an older clientele," co-owner Michael Pijanowski says. "The Strip has gotten a black eye in the past. Basically, it was a meat market. We need some nice places."

Of the club's sci-fi theme, he says, "It starved itself out. There's about a 2_-year shelf life on any club down here."

Unlike some people you meet Saturday night, this new generation of clubs still look good the morning after. With its earth tones, drapes and groupings of plush furniture and coffee tables, Bossa Nova, owned by Metropol owner Robin Fernandez, has no need to hide from the daylight.

"The big clubs are starting to fade," Fernandez says. Of the custom-designed, circular bar, he says, "It allows people to see who's on the other side, to flirt and be coy, to engage in a ritual."

Fernandez had a concept for Boss Nova before they even had a specific space, says architect Bianco. Its courtyard-style layout, sectioned off into smaller niche areas, is intended to create a sense of community, he says.

"If you go to a dance club, it's a sort of one-shot experience," Bianco says. "The bar's over there, this is the dance floor - it's like, everybody, run for your life. In a lounge space, the idea is that you want to have a variety of spaces so that people want to sit in different places, even though it's one large room."

PROMOTING SYNERGY

Joe Michels of Green Tree owned his building contracting business for 10 years. He then was director of properties for Ladbroke USA, where he worked with architects and engineers to develop the design of casinos, clubs, hotels and restaurants. He approved all the drawings, worked with them on original schematic layout and had final approval of drawings.

The experience served him well when he purchased a former Catholic Church in the West End, which he reconfigured into Chapel of Blues.

Michels says he didn't have to do much to the building. But he did make conscious design choices, such as the oversize bar in the middle of the room.

"We intentionally offset the bar so the table seating is down the left side and the standing-room-only seating is down the right hand side. I think that helps create some synergy. The couples who come in migrate to the tables. The singles migrate to the right."

A club's look and feel has less to do with trends than with budgetary constraints - the limitations imposed by the building's original design and the practical functions it must serve in its new incarnation as a place where people drink and dance until 2 a.m.

All three came into play when architect Felix Fukui and restaurateur Clinton Pohl set about transforming a deconsecrated Slovak church into the Sanctuary nightclub.

"I told them the things I needed to have," Pohl says. "They did those things first and designed around them."

The challenge for Fukui and design team member Dana Stanik was to fulfill the practical functions of the club without sacrificing aesthetic appeal.

"That's always the tension in architecture," Fukui says. "It's not like art. It's not a purely aesthetic experience, purely conceptual. People have to use it, and it has to work. It has to keep water out. People have to be able to go to the bathroom, people have to be able to get from point A to point B."

Some examples: