The Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) is a nomadic annual music festival. For the last 14 years, this event has been held in a different world city, welcoming the sixty pre-selected international participants and surrounding them with musicians, producers, and DJs, thereby giving them the opportunity to experiment with and exchange knowledge and ideas about the world of music.
The 2011 edition of RBMA was going to be held in Tokyo, but given the devastating effects of the earthquake, the location had to be changed. With only five months to plan, the city of Madrid took over. The creative space known as Matadero Madrid, which is located in an early 20th century industrial warehouse complex, was designated as the event’s new location.
In many ways this project shares the logic of a Russian matryoshka doll. Not only in the most literal, physical sense, in which one thing is directly incorporated into another, but also in a temporal sense, in which one actually originates within the other
Under these circumstances and in an emergency situation, the work began on an infrastructure capable of meeting the precise technical and acoustic needs of the event, in addition to accelerating, promoting and enriching a series of extremely intense artistic encounters that would take place between the participating musicians, while at the same time adding an environment that would record and archive everything taking place.
The event’s acoustic requirements determined its geometry, as well as the choice of materials and constructive solutions. Each of the areas acquired a specific logic that corresponded with its usage, thereby making it possible to uniquely resolve its acoustic needs. Some heterogeneous solutions included the massive walls in the recording studios, the absorbent surfaces of the cloth domes in the conference room and the structural and geometric independence of the nonparallel pavilions.
