Alaska Alaska transforms a cult piece of modernist design into a striking speaker

Design studio Alaska Alaska has reshaped the bookshelf speaker, drawing inspiration from an unlikely source and teaming up with limited-run specialists Caliper to create an audio objet d’art that’s both collectable and cutting edge. Tawanda Chiweshe and Francisco Gaspar’s studio took inspiration in part from the K67 Kiosk, a cult piece of pop culture from the Slovenian architect and designer Saša Mächtig. This factory-built portable kiosk found a wide variety of uses across the former Eastern Bloc, its boldly coloured forms surviving into the present day.

The AA67 transforms the little cabin into a compact speaker housing, shrinking it down to size whilst retaining the look and feel of the original, with a fibre-glass construction. Revealed last year at Milan Design Week, the AA67 is now available to order via Caliper, the Madrid-based design and fabrication studio. Just 25 will be made in the first run, as part of Caliper’s Editions Programme, offered in a range of eight colours that reference the polychromatic splendour of the original: blue, grey, orange, black, grape, green, pink and white.

The speaker forms one element of a larger furniture series, including a speaker shelf, a sofa, a table, a bench, and a shelving unit, all designed around the idea of taking icons and recontextualising them for the domestic landscape. Caliper’s role as an intermediary between the worlds of limited-run manufacturing, established industrial processes and the more rarefied arena of design prototypes will bring the AA67 to life.

The speaker housing contains an 8-inch coaxial speaker with a cast aluminium chassis. Hardware is in stainless steel and each unit has an anodised aluminium plaque bearing the edition number. Chiweshe and Gaspar describe their studio as ‘thriving in the tension between order and chaos, creating work that dialogues between disciplines while remaining deeply connected to the present moment’. The AA67 edition transforms the functional into the domestic, retaining the utopian boldness of the original for a very different world.

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