Social Kissa: the interactive listening bar for trade fair evenings of 200 guests or more

In 1929, people in the early jazz kissa shared a record because it was unaffordable and nobody could own one. In 2026, everyone carries all the music in the world in their pocket. Back then the record was scarce; today attention is. The Social Kissa turns the origins of kissa culture on their head and stays true to them: a room where individualism becomes community through music. Attention, won by playing your own favourite song.

Kurokawa writes: ‘Parallelism (hei) refers to a flat structure without layers.’ Western cities grow like a tree, while ‘a Japanese village is laid out in the manner of a parallel network’. The classic kissa is a tree: the master chooses, everyone else listens. The Social Kissa is a village. Every guest is a spoke, and the hub belongs to no one. Laozi wrote it down 2,500 years ago: ‘The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends.’ Because the desk belongs to everyone, the evening turns.

Kurokawa calls hi ‘splendor created through concealment’ and quotes the Noh master Zeami: ‘Hi sureba hana’ – the flower emerges through concealment. That is why, at the Social Kissa, nobody explains their record. Whoever plays it gives the room a piece of themselves, without a word. The others read it their own way. And out of that reading, conversation grows.

Ma, the space between, keeps things, sounds and images at a distance from one another so that they can be in harmony; Kurokawa calls it mutual harmony. At the Social Kissa, ma is the moment the needle lifts and the next record is still in the crate. That is where conversation begins. Ma is also the distance between people: nobody is pulled up to the desk. We, too, design such transitions, with the Offbeat-Service© Method. Japanese aesthetics calls this space between ma.

Kurokawa writes: ‘There are two points of departure for architecture: caves and pillars.’ The cave encloses a clearly bounded space; the pillar only suggests one. ‘Japanese people place the greatest importance on this vague atmosphere generated by people and things.’ The Social Kissa is a room of pillars. No stage, no front, no lecture hall. Desk, bar and lounge islands stand in the room like pillars, and the music comes from no single direction. It is everywhere.

For Kurokawa, ‘the sense of the temporary and transient (ka) reflects a willingness to live positively’. The evening at the Social Kissa flows. Our DJ begins, the guests take over, and no setlist survives the night. Every record carries memories. What played that evening played exactly once.

‘Catastrophe is a vital force which comes into being at the moment of destruction,’ Kurokawa writes of ha, the break as a creative force. Martial arts and the way of tea have known it for centuries as shu-ha-ri: learn the form, break the form, leave the form. In November 2019, people of different generations came together in the university’s Lichthof for the LMU Alumni Homecoming: alumni, professors, deans and people from business and industry. So we put a desk with turntables in the room, together with the defining LPs of those generations. Then we handed over the needle. At the Social Kissa, every guest plays their own records. Nobody has to explain anything. The music speaks. Around the turntables, lively talk springs up about the song that’s playing, genres, philosophy and everything under the sun. We didn’t abolish the kissa’s rule of silence; we opened it up.

As in kintsugi, the seam stays visible, and it is made of gold.

The Bauhaus would have understood. It was a workshop, not an academy: masters and journeymen at one table, learning by doing. At its parties everyone joined in, and the Bauhaus band played jazz. In February 1929, Dessau celebrated the Metal Party. That same year, Black Bird, the first jazz kissa, opened in Tokyo. Two workshops of shared listening, on two continents, in the same year. Gropius’s motto of 1923, ‘Art and technology – a new unity’, still describes every hi-fi system in a kissa.

Dieter Rams, Braun’s chief designer for decades, called for good design that is unobtrusive, honest and ‘as little design as possible’. Our DJ works the same way. He steps back as soon as the guests take over. A desk, a crate, wood and vinyl. From the start, Issey Miyake was drawn to the space between the body and the clothes, not to the garment itself. We design the space between music and listener, not the programme. That is why a product designer from Kronberg and a fashion designer from Hiroshima describe our DJ so well: he shapes what lies in between.

In the end, what counts is what’s playing. Jazz, which made the kissa great. Soul, which keeps nobody in their seat. And whatever your guests pull from the crate: funk, chanson, bossa nova, the most important record from their teenage bedroom. Around it, the setting we described above, and a sommelier who knows the record that’s playing. One song, and a whole era is back. Kurokawa calls this bi: ‘it is precisely the details (bi) that embrace the whole.’ One record, one evening, one company.