when speakers become sculpture...

the cover photo from a 1960 issue of pf reporter and electronic servicing magazine. the rest of the magazine is nothing to speak of, but i really love this cover shot. most of us spend our whole lives looking at audio systems like this from a distance, but this lucky repairman looks like he's about to climb inside one. it's nice to see the scale relationship of the speaker mass to a human.

part louise nevelson, part moholy nagy, and part donald judd's nightmare; the cubes, curves, and cubby holes form a pretty wonderful piece of sculpture. the visual pleasures here are most likely an artifact of decisions that had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with acoustics; but there is certainly at least a small drifting cloud's worth of inspiration to be absorbed from the collision of forms.

if you look at it upside down it begins to feel like a space capsule or even like architecture. and if man and machine are one it becomes a tree of honeycomb complete with human trunk...