Adjaye's Concrete For Master & Dynamic
Concrete and speakers might not often be said in the same sentence, but David Adjaye has other ideas. The recently Knighted architect who recently celebrated his 50th birthday and completed his largest project to date, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington DC (USA), has designed the speaker-behemoth company Master & Dynamic's latest release.
As you might well known, David Adjaye certainly is an experienced man when it comes to designing with concrete. By the architect's 'Music for Architecture' collaboration with his DJ brother, Peter Adjaye, various musical projects have come to fruition, and since founding his own practice in 2000, Adjaye has also dabbled cross-industries to furniture design with designs exclusively for Moroso and Knoll. Beyond both, however, the speaker design collaboration with Master & Dynamic is an entire departure, where SATORI & SCOUT reckon that their design exceeds all expectations.
As Jonathan Levine, founder of Master & Dynamic explains, "I have been a fan of architecture and design my whole life. I wanted to study architecture and was talked out of it, but I have always maintained a love of design and architectural material." With various of the SATORI & SCOUT team Architect's by degree, they must say that Levine ought to not have been talked out of such a dynamic - pun intended - degree choice, but nonetheless, Levine's nostalgic reminiscence illustrates the contemporary design of the brand, the use of finely crafted materials, and the superb sound that can be produced by such sound-making devices of theirs.
Ill-creatively named the MA770, Adjaye's light-weight, sinuous concrete object offers a curious triangular backing to the product. As explained, "We introduced a new geometry of sound. By using triangles we introduced this extraordinary, gentle curve, which creates a sense of gravity in the form. It's a beautiful old concept - the notion that richness isn't necessarily on the outside, but is about you and your intimacy and discovery." Weighing a more than modest 25kg owed entirely to the concrete materiality, the speaker design is as elegant as it is weighty, as curvaceous as it is bold.
Though Levine has been previously told that building a concrete speaker cannot be done, where concrete's reduced resonance, purer sound and general fantastic durability add to it's dampening abilities that are five times better than wood and ten times better than plastic, taking less than a year to go from paper to store shelves, this Master & Dynamic concrete speaker is certainly on our wishlist.
Discover more about the speaker and purchase online at: MasterDynamic.com
Photography credit : Master & Dynamic