Space to live and make music

The "Music Box", an extraordinary building located directly on the Reuss in Lucerne, is being inaugurated these days. Students of the Lucerne School of Music can live here and practice for hours without disturbing anyone, either inside or outside the building. And that's not all: the sound-optimized building is made of ecologically sustainable and energy-efficient materials. And it is "recyclable". As a temporary timber construction, it can be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere at any time.

The building offers 25 one-room apartments, rehearsal rooms and a mini-concert hall
including grand pianos and other equipment. Even now, before the opening, half of the apartments have already been let.

This remarkable project was initiated and realized by the versatile Lucerne entrepreneur and cultural scientist Urban Frye. On the one hand, he wants to offer aspiring musicians good living and working conditions.
Like everywhere else, it is very difficult to find a place to live in Lucerne where music can be played for hours every day. On the other hand, the building is evidence of active political commitment: the plot on which the house now stands is located in one of the residential areas that are to make way for a new main traffic axis, the so-called Spange Nord, in around ten years' time. Opposition to this has long been building in the city of Lucerne. This extraordinary new building is one of them.