VUE

I n 1924, Danish engineer Peter Bang was at a crossroads. A recent college graduate and the high-hopes son of a successful Danish businessman, Bang had spent the better part of six months working in an American radio factory; but following that, the promising 24-year-old returned to Struer, the small merchant town of his youth, to reassess his career. Upon his return home to Denmark, Bang reconnected with his childhood friend, Svend Olufsen. In the months that followed, the pair spent countless hours locked away in the attic of Olufsen's manor home, experimenting with radios and various forms of technology. Within a year they opened their business: Bang & Olufsen (B&O). B&O is credited with the design of a radio that worked with alternating currents—a significant creation for its time, as most radios were still running on batteries alone. Nearly a century later, B&O is now best known as a producer of high- end audio, picture and multimedia consumer products; the most recent of which is a speaker system called the BeoSound Shape. e "Shape" is a bespoke sound system designed to live on your wall as a high-quality speaker system, as well as a distinctive piece of art. At first glance, the Shape resembles a collection of cloth-covered honeycombs, organized haphazardly into an abstract figure. Depending on where you stand in relation to the Shape, its visual characteristics change dramatically. If you stand on either side of the speakers, the individual tiles look like flat hexagons, but if you stand directly in front and observe the tiles head-on, they appear convincingly as three- dimensional cubes. O F F T H E W A L L G E O M E T R I C D E S I G N By Brenna Holland VUE ON DESIGN V U E N J . C O M 45

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