Itinerant Acoustics - Reversible Architecture for Ruins

Itinerant Acoustics is an architectural and cultural enterprise that transforms ruins, urban voids, and abandoned sites into temporary infrastructures for music and performance. The project originates in Granada, a city whose history demonstrates that even in conditions of decay, architecture can be reactivated through sound.

In the mid-19th century, the Alhambra was a ruin. Yet it was precisely under these conditions of abandonment that informal musical practices began to emerge, small performances, gatherings, spontaneous uses of space. Over time, these gestures evolved into a structured cultural system, culminating in the Festival of Music and Dance, now attracting more than 50,000 spectators each year. The strategy is clear: activating ruins generates culture, economic return, and heritage awareness.

Itinerant Acoustics adopts this same logic as an operational model. The company designs, fabricates, and operates reversible architectural systems specifically conceived for musical use in fragile or underused contexts. From a prefabrication workshop located on the slopes of the Alhambra, modular acoustic pavilions are produced using laminated timber and lightweight steel, optimized for dry assembly, transport, disassembly, and reuse.

The system unfolds in phases: first, the workshop as a productive core; second, a permanent park of acoustically calibrated pavilions functioning as rehearsal spaces and a living showroom; and finally, their deployment during festivals, where these structures travel to ruins across the city and beyond. Each pavilion is designed according to precise acoustic parameters, responding to the specific requirements of different musical genres.

Rather than constructing permanent buildings, Itinerant Acoustics offers time, flexibility, and cultural activation. The structures appear, transform the place, and withdraw, leaving behind use, memory, and value. Because a ruin ceases to be a ruin the moment it resonates again.

2025

Author. William Mulvihill

Location. Granada, Spain

Unit. Lapuerta - ETSAM

Model Visualization. Francisco Tirado