Big Bang Theory

Andre Poulheim is the man behind the wild lines of Bang & Olufsen’s BeoLab 90 speakers.

- Daryl Lee

“Create an icon for our vision of sound”, went the design brief for the Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 90.

The speakers, intended as a present for the Danish electronics company’s 90th birthday, look spectacular, even by B&O’s lofty standards.

The BeoLab 90 takes its place in the pantheon of the maddest-looking speakers of all time.

Creating it, both from an audio engineering and design standpoint, was no easy task.

“It’s the most complex product we and Bang & Olufsen ever did,” says Andre Poulheim, one of the cofounders of Cologne-based design studio Noto, and one of the people behind the speaker’s radical form.

As with most incredibly complex objects, Poulheim states that “the brief was the simplest one we ever got” and “we had endless opportunities”. But, the only problem is that freedom, as George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is slavery.

“If you have a car, you know it needs to have four wheels, so you already have a starting point. But if you look at speakers, it could have any shape,” explains Poulheim. The challenge, he adds, was “to find a solution that would provide an equally unprecedented visual experience. What we always try to do is think of what kind of experience we’re trying to deliver. We define the experience first and think of how to deliver it with its aesthetics and materials.”