Radio emerged as a global mass medium during the 1930s. This created unprecedented opportunities to design the new medium’s visible presence – in landmark studio and headquarters buildings, such as Broadcasting House in London and Radio City in New York, and in domestic wireless receivers.

Most consumer radios were essentially rectangular wooden boxes, often with some Rexine or fabric detailing. However, one of Britain’s largest radio manufacturers, the Ekco company of Southend, adopted Bakelite. A new plastic, Bakelite was created by Dr Leo Baekland in America before the First World War as a synthetic material that lent itself to cheap mass production moulding. To promote the status of what many consumers regarded as an inferior substitute for wood, the firm’s founder E.K. Cole (1904-57) invited radical Modernist designs. The two most famous were by the architects Serge Chermayeff and Wells Coates.

Russian-born Chermayeff was firmly in the Modernist camp in Britain. He was a successful designer of Modernist tubular steel furniture and a member of MARS (Modern Architecture Research Society) which was devoted to the promotion of Modernism. Shortly after designing another Ekco radio (the EC-74) he would partner Erich Mendelsohn on the design of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, one of the most important Modernist buildings in Britain.

Wells Coates, like Chermayeff, would make his lasting mark as an architect, responsible for the Isokon Lawn Road Flats in London in 1933-4. Prior to working on the AD-65, he was already associated with radio through designing ultra-modern studio interiors for Broadcasting House in 1931. Coates was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier and the ideals of Modernism, writing in 1933 that ‘the most fundamental technique is the replacement of natural materials by scientific ones’. The use of Bakelite fitted this programme well, and Coates went even further than Chermayeff in challenging the rectilinear box convention of previous radios.

He approached the design as ‘a piece of modern machinery’, wrote Nikolaus Pevsner, rather than as ‘good modern furniture’. The novel form of the case alludes directly to the circular shape of the loudspeaker, while the tuning dial is expanded to become an emblematic semi-circular strip, counterbalanced by understated control knobs. In 1937, Pevsner singled out these two radios as examples of innovative design, remarking on their immediate popularity with buying public.