Designer Cécile Barani on taking hifi to new heights with Swiss audio model Goldmund

French designer Cécile Barani was liable for giving form to Swiss audio producer Goldmund’s ultra-high-end speaker programs. We spoke to Barani about her work and the influences and issues that she has dropped at bear on these extremely refined parts. Throughout her research in Monaco, then on the Faculty of Design in Copenhagen, and eventually on the Greater Faculty of Artwork and Design in Saint-Étienne, Barani studied completely different elements of design: object design, area design, and industrial design.

Now based mostly in Paris, the designer has labored on city exterior and bespoke inside furnishings, all the time in multidisciplinary groups. ‘What pursuits me is working by taking the context into consideration, such because the place, the operate, the technical constraints,’ she says.

Goldmund, a Swiss firm established in 1978 to additional the artwork of audiophile-focused manufacturing, approached the younger designer to reshape its monumental sequence of energetic speaker programs. The primary results of the partnership was the Gaia, a sculptural speaker fashioned from a stack of 5 aluminium bins, housing a complete of eight drivers and eight channels of amplification. The Gaia rises to a top of two.1m, making it a real tower system, appropriate for elaborate dwelling installations with a really devoted deal with listening.

‘The primary time I met the Goldmund workforce, they gave me a transparent and detailed temporary. I sat down and listened to their then flagship product, the Apologue. Earlier than that, I’d drafted a number of concepts however as soon as I’d listened to the audio system, I realised the course wasn’t proper,’ Barani says. The Apologue was designed by Italian artist Claudio Rotta Loria in 1987 and one of many authentic pairs was chosen by MoMA, so the bar was set excessive.

For Barani, the expertise decided the visible course. ‘The sound [of the speakers] was so exact and detailed, I knew that I’d must create a visible strategy that didn’t battle with the sound.’ The result’s the Gaia speaker, which retains the signature stacked enclosures of the Apologue however distinguishes itself by its dimension, materials meeting, and refined architectural design. Not like the high-tech constructivist aesthetic of the Apologue, Gaia presents itself as a classy, elegant column.

‘With Gaia, the target was to create a totem-like object with no particular orientation,’ the designer explains. ‘What really fed the venture was my discussions with Goldmund’s engineers. We talked concerning the constraints that speaker placement made on the design and the shape embodies these visually.’

Concerning the fabric used, Barani explains that ‘aluminum is the corporate’s signature, so I needed to maintain it to echo their historical past. The problem of this venture was the meeting of the supplies collectively to realize clear joints and a monolithic look.’

Barani has additionally designed Goldmund’s Pulp sequence, a speaker that makes use of WiSA expertise (a longtime wi-fi digital audio format). Not like the huge and in the end static Gaia audio system, Goldmund expects prospects to wish to transfer their Pulp audio system round, and therefore they’re the corporate’s smallest audio system. ‘The largest constraint was due to this fact the dimensions,’ Barani says. ‘The objective was to combine all of the parts right into a compact enclosure with a minimal and clear design, with out compromising sound high quality.’

The cylindrical Pulp audio system are additionally fashioned from aluminium. Barani drew inspiration from the round parts on the Apologue, which acted as helps and junctions within the speaker’s body. ‘Goldmund additionally needed prospects to have the choice of utilizing the speaker grille, which is one other round ingredient that rotates out of the way in which of the drivers,’ she explains. Out there in both black or gray, the pivoting textile-covered grille permits Pulp to learn as a freestanding sculptural object, both on its self-contained plinth or on the separate stand.

Goldmund isn’t within the behavior of releasing a deluge of latest merchandise yearly, preferring to refine and improve audio system which are designed for a lifetime of use. Between 2023 and 2024, this was a bit of completely different, as your entire assortment was utterly up to date, however usually talking it has an ethos of subtly upgrading merchandise to combine new expertise, not wholesale reinvention.