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The Music Box House in New Orleans brings together two of the city’s most notable cultural legacies: Music and architecture. An art project of bizarre and wondrous proportions, the Music Box House is really a collection of small, purpose-built shanties constructed not into living quarters but into musical instruments. Each small structure, therefore, can be played like any keyboard or drum set.
Created by street artist Swoon and arts organization New Orleans Airlift, the Music Box House was built out of the ruins of a collapsed Creole Cottage by a group of artists and musicians. The result is a small orchestra’s worth of playable shanties — bells and clangers and pedals and organ keys, all built out of the old parts of the house. Sound artists and musicians have been coming to experiment with the contraption, and compositions have even been written specifically for the site. Performances are something like a campfire, school play and cabaret mixed together. It’s a unique piece of artistry and architecture, and shows that there’s really no limit to the sort of creative ways abandoned property can be reused.
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.
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