The ‘Off Club’ (now Dahab Restaurant) is a transformative nightclub in Rome. Merging cinematic, ritual and primordial influences, the design reconfigures space through dual hospitality zones within a quadrangular enclosure, accented by twin black granite altars and a double grey façade—redefining architecture as a transfiguration of the human
Text
Antonino Cardillo
Natural man is not a ‘self’—he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a degree that he is not even sure of his own ego. That is why since time immemorial he has needed the transformation mysteries to turn him into ‘something’, and to rescue him from the animal collective psyche, which is nothing but a variété.
— Carl Gustav Jung, Psychologische Typen (1921)
The restaurant and bar Off Club reunites the cinema of Kubrick and De Palma, Grand Theft Auto IV, Miami Art Deco District, the Escher’s perspectives, Byzantine iconostases, and Japanese folding screens.
This work continues the investigation of Primordial Images presenting an ambience that reunites the sensorial plane of tactility with the intuitive, which projects onto reality the psyche of the observer. The space between the elements recalls the pattern of a mandala and the last works of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—the theme of the double and the one divided.
The two rooms devoted to hospitality form a raumplan six metres in height. Extending right round, a quadrangular enclosure sixteen metres wide unifies the duplex space framing the base of the Vault of the Golden Shadows.
The latter, covering the space within the enclosure, is excavated at the centre by a black apsidal shape. Beneath this centre, a false scale palazzo encloses the contents and functions of the two bars. Constructed of two twin altars 7.22 metres long in black granite, both the bars—mixology on the upper floor and sushi on the lower—counterpoint the opposing sides of the palazzo towards the two rooms.
With its double grey façade the palazzo carries out the apotropaic function of giving faces to the space. An iconostasis made from two twin black monoliths with elongated copper arches masks the face of the palazzo towards the road.
Through the fissure created by the separation of the monoliths a view of figures is revealed. Arches, rhombuses, triangles and discs seem to evoke archaic rituals. Here, ancient and modern syntaxes find conciliation.
Thus, this outline of physical and psychic scapes represents the idea of the architecture as transfiguration of the human.
Data
Time:Design (Feb – Oct 2017); Construction (Oct 2017 – Jun 2018); Photography (Jun 2018); Text drafting (Sep 2018); Off Club activity (Dec 2018 – Feb 2022); Anima Restaurant and Club activity (Sep 2023 – Oct 2024); Dahab Ristorante activity (Mar 2025 – ongoing)
Place: Dahab Ristorante, Via di Casal Bertone, 64, Rome, Italy
At the invitation of curator Gaia Maria Lombardo, Andrea Paolo Massara guides the visitors through the Off Club project of Cardillo, part of the ‘Open House Rome 2024’ program.
At the invitation of the students of the Royal College of Art, Cardillo talked about ’The making of Rome’s Off Club’ in the Inside/Out series curated by representatives Yara Boulos and Riccardo Rizzetto of the Interior Design department.
Royal College of Art, London, .
Publications
2025 – 2018 (selected)
Stefan Grundmann, ‘M86-M88 Palazzo Rhinozeros, Off Club, Vestibül Domus Aurea’, Architekturführer Rom, Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart/London, 15 Feb. 2025, pp. 367‑369.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘Simulazione come ermeneutica della realtà’, Artbox – Puntata del 5/3/2025[television programme], ed. Didi Gnocchi, La7, Milan, 6 March 2025. Transcript published on antoninocardillo.com, 6 March 2025.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘Anima Restaurant and Club’, Open House Roma, cur. Gaia Maria Lombardo, Rome, 8 March 2024.
Johannes Kister, ‘Vortragsreihe: Dessauer Gespräche’, in Next to Bauhaus, vol. 2, ed. Matthias Hoehne, Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau Institute of Architecture, March 2020, pp. 216‑217.
