Vampirizing the Downtown Athletic Club: Nike's House of Innovation as a Contemporary Commercial Hybrid

Abstract

Advertising and marketing are now adapting to new digital media in order to maintain their influence over consumers, especially in the field of lifestyle brands. These companies are trying to find alternatives to renew the emotional bond with their clientele; and in the context of the experience economy, the hybrid architecture of new retail—halfway between the physical and the digital—today operates as one of their main assets. This article analyzes the case of the Nike House of Innovation 000: a store built in New York City that functions as a fully phygitalized commercial hybrid and houses a surprising mix of sporting and commercial experiences. In them, the practice of sports intersects with the promotion of Nike products and services in a behavioral amalgam that provides an effective means of strengthening ties and gaining followers. Beyond their commercial purposes, these programmatic hybridizations seem to guide the transformation of the visitor into a member of a new metropolitan club; an exercise reminiscent of the athletic fictions of the Downtown Athletic Club, celebrated by Koolhaas in Delirious New York (1978) as a way to achieve physical and mental ‘peak’ condition. Given the similarity, this text unravels the way in which the Nike House of Innovation 000 vampirizes the historic New York club, reappropriating and exploiting its transformative power—derived from the constructivist social condenser—to shape behaviors in accordance with a brand ideology: Manhattanism.