While in Bern (lovely city) we visited the Museum of Communications. Here are some shots of historical phone equipment.
Category Archives: News
Art and the phone
New York City pay phones to take users back to 1993
The city pay phones are being used to promote a new art exhibit recounting the year 1993 in New York’s history…
Payphone design
High-tech payphone concept with free Wi-Fi wins NYC design challenge
The people of New York have spoken. They’ve chosen a spiffy new payphone design with free Wi-Fi access and interactive advertising as the winner of a Reinvent Payphones design challenge…
Payphone availability
Is It Time To Commit To Ongoing Payphone Availability?
Public payphones seem headed the way of the dinosaur, as noted here on Slashdot 10 years ago, and again by the CBC earlier this year. Reasons typically cited for their demise are falling usage, (thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone), and rising maintenance costs. But during the recent disaster in NYC caused by Hurricane Sandy public payphones proved their worth…
Model phones and much more
“Alan Wolfson is a master of the miniature. His urban sculptures are tiny, incredibly detailed views of the mundane city landmarks that urban citizens interact with on a daily basis…”
These models include phone boxes (of course).
Click here for ‘tiny streets’.
Alan Wolfson miniatures
Merchandise
“Take this iconic, life-size cabinet home…”
from insiderchic.net
Phone box upgrades in NYC
Giant Touchscreens Coming To NYC Phone Booths
The public pay phone of the future looks like a gigantic iPad. The city plans to unveil 32-inch “smart screens” with Internet connections next month inside 250 old phone booths throughout the five boroughs…
Phone box installations
Concept art for the phone box…
“These 12 concept mobile phone telephone booths attempt to recapture the personal isolation those old public phones provided while enhancing the experience of conversing in the city.”
Design aspects
In my artefacts lecture today we had a visit from Bill Sillar. He enlightened us on the origins for the design of the red UK phone box (among many other things). Giles Gilbert Scott based it on the John Soane Mausoleum in St Pancras Old Churchyard.
Soane Mausoleum
source: UCL Dept Earth Sciences
As a class we recently visited LARC where the original architectual model for the red phone box is kept. It’s about 1 metre in height. Annoyingly I didn’t take a camera.
Urinals
While I photograph phone boxes I have discovered that Cory McAbee (of American Astronaut and Stingray Sam fame) takes photos of urinals.
For a look go to: http://thesmalleststar.blogspot.com/
(update 12/11/15 – can’t find his post on his blog anymore. Ah well.)