Dr Catharine Rossi is a design historian based at Kingston School of Art. Her research interests range from post-war Italian design to the relationship between design and craft, and the design history of nightclubs. In 2015 she published Designing Craft in Italy: from Postwar to Postmodernism (MUP) and is the co-editor with Alex Coles of the forthcoming book Post-Craft (Sternberg Press, 2022). Curatorial projects include Space Electronic: Then and Now for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and the co-curation of Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today, a touring exhibition which opened at Vitra Design Museum in 2018 and which is currently at V&A Dundee (Scotland).

In this lecture Catharine Ross will reflect on her experiences of curating exhibitions on the design of club culture, including Space Electronic: Then and Now for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, the co-curated Radical Disco at the ICA in London and the co-curated touring exhibition Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today, which opened at Vitra Design Museum in 2018 and which is currently at V&A Dundee (Scotland). The talk will include an emphasis on the curatorial challenges presented by researching this subcultural, nocturnal theme, billed as a “non-existent” form of architecture, and attempts to exhibit issues of atmosphere, experience and the senses in exhibitions on this subject.