Designed to club

Elevate in New Delhi is the only club in Asia to have a body sonic dance floor.

On any given weekend, club Elevate in the NCR is packed with thousands of music-hungry youngsters who throng the dance floor while DJ Dale belts out an appetite for them complete with hip-hop, trance, techno and popular Bollywood tracks.

The dance floor is extraordinary: a "body sonic dance floor", as Dave Perry, principal architect and designer of the club calls it, it vibrates with such intensity that it is said to be equivalent to 6.1 on the Richter scale. Elevate is the first club in Asia and the third in the world to boast of such a dance floor.

"London's Fabric club, which I designed, has a similar dance floor, another club in Scotland has this type of a dance floor while Elevate is the third one," says Perry, while chatting with us from his London office.

Elevate was Perry's first project in India and though he doesn't divulge details on how much was spent there, a flat design fee of ¤5,000 was taken by the architect and Perry commissioned on a one-year contract by Elevate's owner

Monty Chadha. "Typically, a dance floor costs anywhere between ¤12,000-15,000 to make. A body sonic dance floor, on the other hand, costs ¤125,000 upwards," he informs us.

Perry remembers studying the technique carefully for six months before coming to India and working on Elevate. "Though I had already designed Fabric in London, we were looking at a relatively smaller structure in Elevate. Most importantly, the concept was very new anyway. We were staring at a square-shaped building (that eventually made things easier) and a relatively smaller structure, and to be honest, I couldn't make a mess of my first design commitment in India," he says.

So Perry and his team began carefully by experimenting first on a small wooden panel that was part of the dance floor. Underneath the panel, Perry painstakingly fitted transducers that "" believe it or not "" transmit bass frequencies for people to feel the vibrations along with the music.

"The process is called induction and it transmits bass directly into the human body via the feet. There are actually chemical changes in your body to create a feeling of euphoria," Perry explains.

Once they'd experimented successfully on the wooden panel they moved gradually to the other panels and in the course of time 46 transducers were fitted underneath Elevate's dance floor.

"It's cutting technology really, each transducer takes 1,000-1,500 watts of bass sound, and trust me, 46 transducers can do a hell of a lot to those on the dance floor!" he quips.

At Elevate, youngsters on the dance floor will certainly vouch for Perry's last statement. His involvement was specifically on the design of the dance floor (Elevate's USP definitely), sound and the lighting systems, and the club today boasts of one lakh watts of sound spread on three different floors including a terrace that can accommodate 2,500 people in one go and 600 people on the dance floor.

As far as the interiors of the club are concerned, UK-based Igloo Designs was consulted for some of the interesting accessories and furniture pieces. Chadha personally picked up the sturdy, regal-looking chairs in silver too.

While there are rather futuristic-looking lounge chairs in white, bean bags and plastic furniture in fluorescent green too, we couldn't ignore the "bubble" chair, the Eero Aarnio design made from clear acrylic and chromed steel.

What's special about the chair is that it swallows the sound and can make one feel isolated even if one is in a crowded place. Its cost: not less than Rs 1.5 lakh and from what we were told, there are only a select number of "bubble" chairs floating in the world.

It hangs from the ceiling on the mezzanine floor right next to the huge window structure that is covered with fire-proof curtains. Looking a little closer, I find burnt cigarette holes on the curtains till a spokesperson smiles and tells me, "You see, even if a person brings the cigarette to the curtain, it will never ever spread or catch fire."

Perry feels Elevate is one of the very few night clubs in the world to have seriously incorporated design and architecture with music. The 35th best night club in the world, according to DJ Mag, Elevate according to Perry, "can compete with the top 10 nightclubs in Britain".

Ready to hit the body sonic dance floor this weekend?