SUSANNE WENGER SE Musiclab is situated in a seven-metre-high concrete hall nestled at the foot of the Gurten hill at Wabern station in the Berne suburb of Köniz. The former Gurten brewery used to bottle and store its beer at these spacious premises until 1996. According to the mastermind behind SE Musiclab, Jürgen Strauss, such suitable venues as this are few and far between. Strauss, a 57-year-old from Berne, had a clear vision of what he wanted, namely to bring music and other sounds to life in an optimal space with high ceilings and a high area load. “We installed one hundred tonnes of material to create the best possible acoustics.” The material went into building the “Lab”, a soundproof cylindrical structure housed inside the repurposed brewery. Five metres in height and 11 metres in diameter, with a double shell made from 60 tonnes of clay and 40 tonnes of wood, this free-standing rotunda is the centrepiece of the project. The outer shell, consisting of 32,000 soft mud bricks, was built in situ by a mobile robotic system developed at ETH Zurich, which needed three months to complete the job. It Extraordinary acoustics on the outskirts of Berne SE Musiclab is a remarkable new audio facility near Berne. Its founder and creator Jürgen Strauss has spared no expense in equipping a former brewery with next-level acoustics. We paid him a visit. was a pioneering and painstaking construction process – but worth the effort, because the finished interior is deathly quiet. “Quieter than the most secluded Swiss mountain valley covered metres deep in snow”, says Strauss. Three-dimensional soundscape No exterior sounds can enter the Lab – not even the rumble of passing trains. Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) went as far as re-laying the rail tracks at Wabern to prevent ground vibrations from affecting the sound qualSound pioneer Jürgen Strauss in front of the centrepiece of his sound lab. In the background, the wall made from 32,000 clay balls can be seen. Photos: Remo Neuhaus, supplied Swiss Review / December 2022 / No.6 28 Culture
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