The architect’s task while designing the interior of this music club was that of realising the vision of a unique spatial and acoustic experience together with the client. An overall spatial concept that had to fulfill high design aspirations as well as acoustic challenges was devised.
The music club’s some 600m² are divided into two differently sized dance floors and one bar room.
On the first dance floor, Blitz, which is 35m long and 8m wide, the technical, functional aesthetics of steel and wood form the dominant element. The custom-made wall and ceiling panels, specially optimised for electronic music, play an important role in the acoustics of the room.
The second dance floor, Plus, is acoustically isolated and speaks its own design language. Without a noticeable beginning or end, a continuous flow of ‘recesses’ lines the walls. These relief-like recesses are flooded by light that changes to the sound of the music. The visitor is immersed in a world of music, light and abstract shapes.
The computational designer Simon Vorhammer developed an algorithm for spreading more than 10.000 ‘valleys’ and ‘ridges’ over an overall length of 25m. It is based on the behaviour of flocking birds and swarming fish and insects. The pattern never repeats itself. During the short period of four months from the planning to the completion of the project, the biggest challenge was that of finding an efficient process for the fabrication and coordination of the different engineering elements.
In the main room the designers chose black steel for all absorber and co-oscillator surfaces and beech plywood for the diffuser surfaces. In addition to processing aspects, the resulting contrast between warm, comfortable and cold, functional surfaces played an important role for this choice.
In the secondary floor, all surfaces are made of black, matt-finished MDF, which offers the ideal basis for the play of relief and light in its CNC-workability and surface finish.As the fabrication of the diffuser surfaces in the main room required extensive machining time the architects had to come up with a concept to produce the wall panels of the small room in a cost-effective way which led to the development of a custom algorithm, who's output was fed into the CNC-machines directly.
The Blitz Club opened its doors on 22 April 2017 and has since become a new and internationally renowned fixture in Munich’s nightlife.
The collaboration of Studio Knack and Simon Vorhammer on this project has led them to the founding of a new venture called KOOR. Under this brand, the team is further developing and marketing the wall structures explained above as acoustic panels. Furthermore, they are in the process of developing new unique acoustic structures.
