It was a Sunday afternoon and I was cautiously studying what I suspected might be the entrance to a Berlin nightclub. What I knew for certain was that I was in the central neighborhood of Friedrichshain, in an area that seemed far more populated with cars and trees than with humans. My friend Lily and her smartphone had led us to a pair of thin timber pickets, marking a gate in an otherwise unbroken concrete wall. Adjacent to us, a four-lane expressway hissed with traffic. The closest visible eatery was a gas-station minimarket. Apparently, we had arrived at our destination.

Like many things in this city, the club was practically hidden, its entrance slipped somewhere between dense thickets of trees, long thruways, and somber housing blocks. Berlin, I had learned, was a city that asked to be discovered slowly and by accident. Picturesque courtyards blossomed behind austere building facades. Art galleries manifested inside old bunkers and train stations.

It was the perversity of going to a nightclub during the day that most appealed to me. I had first assumed that Berlin’s club scene was off-limits to someone with paltry knowledge of techno and house music. But the names of its venues kept slipping into conversation. Tresor. Berghain. Bar 25. I imagined spaces of sublime darkness, piercing lights, and warm bodies.

Some destinations maintained inscrutable front-door policies, bouncers who, with a flick of the head, welcomed you in or sent you away. For the uninitiated, getting in the front door can feel like making a religious pilgrimage. At this place, the entry ritual involved a brief dialogue. Were we sure we were at the right place? Of course, we bluffed. Did we know about the DJ sets? Yes, we replied, grasping at some names we had read online. With strained composure, we paid the cover charge (a fluctuating fee that hovered around €12 that afternoon), exposed our wrists to receive stamps of approval, and were welcomed in.

The club was called Kater Blau, although to say that we were let “into it” might be misleading; after passing through a small vestibule, we found ourselves back in the open air. The club, as far as I could see, existed largely outdoors, in a sliver of space between the Spree River and a massive, elevated S-Bahn track. Apart from this monument of infrastructure, the space had no coherent wrapper.

Especially by the light of day, Kater looked emphatically informal, a hodge-podge of spaces barely defined with plywood partitions, corrugated metal, and objects meant to function as furniture. The club appeared to be in a perpetual state of construction. Standing by the entrance, I could make out a cabana-like dance floor to my left. To my right was an arrangement of outdoor furniture, chairs and benches spread out against a backdrop of repurposed shipping containers. Further in, I discovered a bar area stocked with drinks but relatively unpeopled, and beyond that lay a sprawling patio made of staggered wooden platforms that spilled out onto the river, colonizing a small tugboat tethered to the bank by a cargo net that doubled as an oversize hammock. One regular told me that the owners occasionally add and subtract elements, swap out furniture, affix a new basketball hoop, or make space for a karaoke booth.

The informality of its architecture expressed a willingness of the space to modify and reinvent itself as time progressed.

As day progressed into night, Kater revealed new spaces to explore: previously locked doors opened to reveal booming dance halls; an uninhabited shipping container became a sandwich counter; a crêpe stand popped up, all of a sudden perfuming the air with butter. I hardly noticed when the sun set and Berlin’s overcast sky gave way to Kater’s floodlights. The crowds—at this point full of familiar faces—were now drifting between outdoor spaces and enclosed rooms charged with music and body heat, from intimate conversation to the blissful anonymity of the dance floor.

It has been said that the clubs in Berlin have the uncanny ability to distort time. A documentary on Bar 25, a club that opened in 2004 and multi-tasked as a hostel, performance space, and restaurant before shuttering in 2010, plainly refers to this phenomenon in its subtitle: Days out of Time. A number of interviewees in Feiern (“party” or “celebrate” in German), a 2006 documentary on Berlin’s clubs, wax sentimental about whole weekends evaporating, nights repeatedly melting into mornings. By now, to remark on this warping of time has become almost a cliché.

Before that Sunday, I assumed that the magic of all Berlin clubs relied on the suspension of time—an ecstatically prolonged nocturne. At Kater Blau, however, I experienced the inverse. Recognized as an after-hours venue, Kater seemed designed precisely to welcome the passage of time, to accommodate variations in light and atmosphere and their influence on mood. The informality of its architecture—the melding of exterior and interior spaces, the cobbling together of cheap materials and recycled objects—expressed a willingness of the space to modify and reinvent itself as time progressed.

I learned later that most of Berlin’s clubs began in the period surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall as regular but nomadic gatherings. These incubators of experimental music and cathartic dance parties would appear in and then disappear from the formerly divided city’s defunct spaces—warehouses, bunkers, airplane hangars, even airplanes themselves. Few clubs have ever settled long enough to ossify into institutions. One known as Berghain is something of an exception: along with its upstairs cohabitant, a club called Panorama Bar, it has occupied the renovated turbine hall of a former power plant since 2004. The legendary Tresor, one of the first to evolve out of the raves of the early 1990s, had to forfeit its iconic location in the vault of a former department store to commercial developers in 2005; it took two years for Tresor to find a new space, this time in a former power station. Kater Blau is itself the rebirth of an earlier, shuttered establishment, Kater Holzig, and it sits on the former site of Bar 25, its even more celebrated ancestor. These and other riverside establishments were characterized by an architecture that eschewed stable form, as if to celebrate the precarious hold they had on the land they occupied.

Kater Blau’s slapdash aesthetic reminded me of an art installation staged in New York in the summer of 2013. The Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn constructed a “monument” to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, marshaling institutional funding to build a sprawling outdoor complex that would occupy the grounds of a South Bronx housing project for two and a half months. Hirschhorn—who once goaded art-seeking Parisians to visit a temporary “museum” propped amid housing projects, shantytowns, and a soccer stadium in Aubervilliers—solicited help from residents to build and operate a series of pavilions accessible to the neighborhood as well as the broader public. The project underscored its own transience through aesthetic choices: a library, workshop, bar, and “internet corner” were among several spaces crafted out of scrap wood, cloth, and thin brown packing tape that crinkled, tore, and peeled. In a manifesto, Hirschhorn explains how his temporary structure “enforces the precarious aspect of the monument. It conveys the idea that the monument will disappear, but what will remain are thoughts and reflections. What will stay is the activity of reflection.”

Prominent critics—including artist Glenn Ligon, who grew up in the very housing development where the Gramsci Monument materialized—criticized Hirschhorn for missing the opportunity to mount a more lasting social intervention. It seemed callous to give and then take away energy and resources within a community affronted by socioeconomic inequalities. Yet the plywood and packing-tape constructions represented both lack and potential, the paucity of material conditions and the rich experiences that flower nonetheless. The Gramsci Monument and Kater Blau both are essays in shared make-believe, exercises in looking at what is and collectively imagining what could be, in seeing an underserved community, a slice of postindustrial riverfront, and envisioning an oasis.

I left Kater like, I assume, many others have—sober, strangely unsure of where the hours had gone, and almost unable to say what had happened at all. Just as the space had taken time to unfold, I knew my memory of it would take time to unfold. And that felt wonderfully fine.