In the 1960s, under the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco and with the support of the United States, Spain’s Mediterranean coast developed into an international night-leisure destination where some of the first discotheques in the world emerged. This lecture examines this little-known historical episode, focusing on the appearance of these unprecedented architectures and the body politics they carried with them.

Under the direction of the technocratic authoritarian government, technologies developed during the world wars were repurposed for leisure. Light, sound and psychotropic technologies were introduced into the design of the Spanish discotheque, providing a multimedia environment for the masses. Channelling youth, music and dance cultures, the discotheques operated as multisensory instruments enabling new forms of representation and production of the body.

On the Spanish dancefloors of the late 1960s and early 1970s, millions of visitors arriving from across Europe were introduced to the desiring regimes of libidinal capitalism, generating cultural categories such as coolness and difference that still resonate today. The genealogy of the Spanish discotheque allows us to trace the transformation of what had the potential to be spaces of collective emancipation into sites of managed consumption, where the biopolitics of liberalisation and its accompanying soft-power structures were rehearsed.

The lecture will be introduced and responded to by the Professor of Architecture and design historian Cat Rossi.