Text description provided by the architects. Pop-up club Door19 is a restaurant, modern art gallery and a pre-party bar at the same time. The club, situated on the last floor of ArtHouse on the 19 Serebryanicheskaya emb., will bring the epicenter of Moscow’s cultural and gastronomic life in the area of the future ArtKvartal on the Yauza river for the second time this year.
Moscow is still hot after the first Door 19 where the tables for the coming weekend were already booked early in the week. All this was happening in a yet uninhabited giant penthouse with 12-meter high ceilings in a new residential building ArtHouse. The best street artists in Moscow and Europe, together with a team of the architectural studio P H. D turned it into a temporary club Door 19, which was visited by more than 12000 people during the 6 weeks of its work. All the key Moscow publications wrote about it and not once; even the prestigious Financial Times run a two-page feature.
The ArtKvartal team could not stop at this, of course – “the second coming” of Door19 had to happen as a matter of course. Opening a seemingly familiar door on the 25th September will bring you in another world - different light, different audio and visual component. The art content will be fully updated: to a variety of art genres, young Russian digital art will be added.
ArtKvartal team has come up with a “check-in art” expression: P H. D studio team and its founder Lana Grineva, while renovating the 460 sq m penthouse for its second season, stayed loyal to the idea of having space for air and life in the gigantic 9-meter ceilings loft, leaving the impression of an undone and an elusive interior design. The new balconies and a mezzanine do not only considerably enlarge the club space, but also allow to create new situations for an interplay of guests and the fully updated works of art.
The idea of the art exposition is such that no one would leave without “checking in”. That’s where the term “check in art” comes in: each artwork is screaming out to be in the newsfeed of the guests. There will be works of young artists as well as of those, whose works are represented in the biggest museums of modern art. These are, for example, Andy Warhol parody portraits by the famous photographer David LaChapelle, works by George Condo and Damien Hurst, expressive paintings of Jonathan Meese, digital versions of landmark British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, artist Jenny Holzer world famous for her light installations and many others. A few objects are made specifically for the event, such are the video projection “Spider 2.0” by Dmitriy Bulnygin and an installation “Apollo in sunglasses” by the Russian digital art pioneers Electroboutique.
While coming up with the bar programme for this fall, ArtKvartal team has gathered the brightest stars of the Moscow's nightlife venues, who will be here everyday. As guest stars, seasoned mixologists from Europe will be changing every week. There will be new faces mostly, but as a conclusion there's a surprise: during the fourth and the fifth week, the first Door's darling – Andreas Tsanos, who is also one of London's top 5 barmen and was at the conception of the now iconic London venues such as the Hakkasan, Sketch and others – will be taking care of you at the bar.
The fashion magazine's favourite young designer Vardoui Nazarian is in charge of how the staff looks – she produced the uniform for Door19, taking as a base some element from her current collection. The sound will be taken care of by the Main in Main group, who specialize in sound design of public spaces. They find the concept of the pop-up club in Serebryanicheskaya embankment as one of the most powerful this year in Moscow and, inspired, undertook the job. They have formed the playlist according to the ethnicity of the chefs from eleven countries, mixing the genres and styles in such way, that not only the taste and visual receptors, but also the auditory sense of Door 19 guests would get the right signal.
The leading heroes of the kitchen come from Peru, Brazil, Chili, Mexico, Argentina, who will be joined by their Asian colleagues. Yet first and foremost, Latin America is in the spotlight: chefs from this continent are running the show in the best restaurants of New York and London, but so far this cuisine is almost non-present in Moscow. When gathering the bravest of the best chefs, ArtKvartal team was guided not by the conservative Michelin stars, but by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants sponsored by S. Pellegrino & Acqua Panna listing. Only the format stays the same: the club is open only for dinners, there are two sets from two chefs and each week there is a new pair of visiting chefs – in the same venue.
Experience of the first Door 19 has shown that the last floor penthouse has its own special energy, where there is creativity, life and freedom. After “the second coming” it will be impossible to get in on the residential floors “from the street" as in middle of autumn the construction will be finished in the neighboring apartments and the tenants will move in. But it doesn’t mean that the curtain will fall in ArtKvartal, on the contrary! Door19 was envisioned not just to eat, drink and socialize nicely for five weeks. This was our way to attract attention to the grand cityplanning idea to create the neighborhood of the new quality en lieu of the still bleak 510ha territory along the Yauza river.
