Red Bull Music Academy’s Warehouse 15 by Langarita-Navarro takes up in Matadero Madrid.

Gracia Cardona

21 febrero 2012

The grand opening of the Red Bull Music Academy 2011 was meant to be celebrated in Tokyo, but given the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, the location had to be moved to Madrid to be presented in October. Due to the emergency circumstances, the Langarita-Navarro studio decided to create Matadero Madrid Warehouse 15, “a temporary structure based on the criteria of adaptability and reversibility making it easy to completely or partially reconfigure over time».

Both the project and the music event were a real success and Langarita-Navarro carried on with the project creating the Nave de Música (music warehouse), a 4,000 m2 space which was opened on the 23^rd February. The former RBMA head office will once again hold a great number of music-related activities such as studio sessions and gigs for musicians, producers and other music professionals.

Warehouse 15 project, la Nave de la Música:

With just 5 months to organize the event, Matadero Madrid’s Warehouse 15 was decided upom as the perfect location for the project. Plans for an even more ambitious project began for Langarita-Navarro studio: Nave de la Música, a space specifically dedicated to audio creation and research.

For that reason, María Langarita and Víctor Navarro think that “in many senses, this project shares the logic of a Russian matryoshka doll. Not only in the physical and literal sense of the word, in which one thing is directly incorporated into another, but also in a temporal sense, in which one actually originates from the other«.

Warehouse 15 in Matadero is a 4,700 m2 space comprising of a metallic structure with a brick facade. Directly opening to the outside, the space is a cultural heritage site as is the rest  of the Matadero Madrid site.

Using the existing installation as a starting point and leaving the warehouse intact, the construction project was approached as a infraestructure capable of meeting the precise technical and acoustic requirements of the event, in addition to accelerating, promoting and enriching a series of intense artistic encounters among the participating musicians, while adding an environment that would record and archive all the events which take place.

The program’s organization has allocated four specific areas to the project: offices, music studios, recording studios and an area devoted to conferences, radio and relaxing. Both the spatial and constructive structures would allow for the reconfiguration of all four spaces for future events.

The “most striking” installations were thought-up to be reversible and easily recycled in the future. Some solutions include using sandbags to make up the walls of the recording studios or potted plants that could easily be moved to other areas of the Matadero or the city itself.

As a result, the project unfolds in the warehouse’s interior presenting a fragmented urban structure in which the variable relationship between proximity and independence, and preexistence and performance could offer unexpected stages to its visitors.

Photography and plans courtesy of Langarita-Navarro Studio, by  Estudio Langarita-Navarro, Luis Díaz Díaz and Miguel de Guzmán.

More about Langarita-Navarro on diarioDESIGN.

More info about the activities of the new Nave de Música de Matadero de Madrid.

More info about Red Bull Music Academy here.