The Montreux Jazz Heritage Lab 1 is a habitable architectural module that allows the user to plunge into 45 years of jazz, blues and rock concerts in the form of digital archives. The shape of its projection surface, precisely curved in order to enhance embodied user experience, finds its precedents in trompe l’œil effects brought to excellence in the baroque age. This device therefore draws reference from a specific pictorial heritage, combining a corporeal experience of visual content with the archives of musical heritage. The collaboration with the acoustics laboratory LEMA at EPFL had a profound influence onto the geometry of the project and the materials used. The micro-perforated screen offers acoustics transparence, which permits the masking of speakers behind it whilst glass panels located behind the screen equally transmit light. The opening mechanism allows for a folding away of an entire wall as a door, thus allowing the device to be operated in two different modes: acoustically isolated for a small audience inside the space of the module, or open and accessible to a larger audience. Through its transparence and its capacity to modify its configuration, the module becomes an actor in a larger space in which it resides.
labs: EPFL + ECAL lab, ALICE and LEMA EPFL
team: Dieter Dietz, Olivier Ottevaere, Charlotte Erckrath, Lukas Lenherr, Tibo Smith, Christopher Tan, Alexander Hertel, ALICE EPFL
photographs © Joël Tettamanti & Daniela Droz, Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
all images courtesy of ALICE studio EPFL