Soundproof surfaces: Blitz Electronic Music Club in Munich

You can stand in front of the club at night on the weekend and have no idea of what’s going on inside: there are no signs, there is no commotion and you can’t even hear any music. The entrance is only visible as a result of the queue, which gradually disappears into one of many inconspicuous doors. After passing through the vestibule and cloakroom and the side bar, one walks on a path of Solnhofen tiles into the club’s increasingly audible epicentre. Once on the dance floor guests will finally be struck by the full force of an incredibly powerful yet extremely refined sound system, which appears to double in the symmetrical, almost church-like interiors made of black steel and beech laminated veneer lumber. 

In addition to operators, architects and acoustics experts, stereo equipment fabrication specialists Void Acoustics also sat at the design table and ran through, with the help of the architects’ parametric 3D-models, various alternatives according to their aesthetic and acoustic qualities.

Soundproof surfaces
The conversion was in essence limited to the walls and floors. The latter consists of loosely laid black and comparatively soft waterproof plywood panels that are highly suitable for dancing. The lateral walls feature seating alcoves, which are located at precise distances between existing supports. What the architects developed here under the succinct working title of ‘beach chair’ is in reality a sophisticated and soundproof element that has been developed down to the very last detail.The tilted rear walls are each made of two 10 cm-thick CNC-milled beech LVL boards equipped with a pattern of rhombs of different sizes and depths that not only provide a warm timbre but also serve as diffusers that break up the sound and scatter it in all directions.