Zanzibar

Zanzibar

Newark, New Jersey

Interior spaces, materials, and lighting design by Mark D. Kruger, MIES

The goal of this restaurant, bar, and dance club was a spatially discontinuous bar/dance club environment, where the visuals, dance floor energy, and socialization spaces were purposefully intermingled and animated.

Formerly a Holiday Inn dining room, the Zanzibar club was transformed into one of the hottest clubs in New Jersey. Here texture was both accidental, as lights were randomly aimed through the metal truss work of the ceiling, and purposeful, in the set up of the glassware in radiantly prismatic spotlights. The multilayered walls were back lit by a process called “crackle neon,” the detail which you saw on the prior page. As the voltage was increased or decreased in the neon tubes, the gas, quite literally, “jitter-bugged” through the obstacle course within each tube. When put on an dimming system timed with slow-fades, the waves of agitated light ebbed and flowed around the room, subliminally directing people’s activity, breaking down the barriers of the standard utilization of a bar and club spaces.