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Carlos Almada : JET-SET HOT TROT By Eli Gottlieb SEPTEMBER 1989 - “My goal is to find new American energy and put it in a building,” declares Carlos Almada, the torrentially creative Argentine architect who has emerged as the leading light of design in New York’s thriving downtown club scene. Overseeing his affairs from a busy, cluttered office in Tribeca (that wedge of Manhattan which is home to some of the city’s swankest boites) Almada, 36, exudes the kind of brash energy normally associated with pop stars or telegenic politicians. “The nightclub scene in New York is something specially,” he asserts in musically accented English, gesturing for emphasis. “It’s not like Paris, where you go to a bar to have fun. Here, a nightclub is the only place to go.” As architect of the currently legendary club M.K., New York’s temple of retro-chic, Almada has already earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. in the subject. Along the way he developed a design method perfectly suited to the jet-set crowd, who see work as a charged form of social life. He parties late with clients, hires friends as collaborators, whenever possible, and says candidly, “I come at projects from the angle of an entrepreneur who wants to have fun hanging out with his pals.” Which is not to say he doesn’t work hard. Almada is booked solid, well into the nineties, with commissions ranging from stage sets and private homes to a film production facility for Robert De Niro. Nonetheless, it is clubs that remain closest to his heart. Two in particular are now on the drawing board: an American branch of Les Bain Douches, the exotic Parisian nightclub housed in an old Turkish bath, whose New York version, he promises, will be “just as intimate and atmospheric as the original,” and an as-yet-unnamed club which Almada alarmingly describes as “large, energetic, done in a machine-age motif with computer accents, and just right for people who want to dance all night.”
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© ELLE 1989