The New re-PUBLIC,

From i.antonio films

Ode to the Public Telephone Booth

I was in Zurich at a gallery and I needed to call a friend to pick me up. I was to call on a public phone but had no idea where I could find one. I asked the desk clerk where the nearest phone booth was located. He gave me a smirk as if I asked him if its possible to send a telegram via horse messenger. 'They don't exist. There is no need for public phones anymore.' Of course I insisted there must be one in the city. He admitted, 'Yes you can take the bus to the train station and you'll find one there.' I was eyed his desk phone. He looked down and returned to his email. I looked at some postcards, bought a bauhaus card and while he rang it up, I asked him if I could use his telephone. Reluctantly he permitted my intrusive request. I thought it strange behavior, but perhaps my request was too personal in a too public space.

Some international solutions to the end of the telephone booth...


An oversized lampshade to pull over your head for private cell phone conversations. Another wonderful isolation from cell phone concepts, by Yang Shi Wei and Shawn Wein Shin from taiwan. Thanks to Designboom.


The floatable jellyfish-like vessels project drift around cities to create ephemeral zones of truly private space: an absence of phone calls, emails, access of GPS devices, TV broadcasts, wireless networks and other microwave emissions. They can also provide shielding from the gaze surveillance systems. Courtesy of Usman Haque

or


By wearing the mobile phone scarf, you can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment. By WMMNA

More solutions to speaking in public via Textually.org

Moving Houses

In the New Yorker last week there was an article, 'Big Pictures' that made the observation that the invention of the portable movie players will prompt the end of the current cinema house. The new movie theater will follow the desig of the ArcLight(LA) or Film Forum(NYC). Both offer a lobby and expansive area as a meeting place with bar, restaurant/cafe, book/gift shop. The architecture of the movie experience expands into a mini-square with the fountain being replaced by the screen.
[ full article ]

What makes a city a city?

Shanghai, the financial hub of China has more skyscrapers than any other city in the world.

Over 60% of the world lives in Asia. The megacities are mostly in Asia. However much of the research on psychogeographics of urban space applies to Western European cultures. Will the influence of the Asian city have an impact on how Western cities are developed in the future. Will the city architecture continue to reflect the society or will cultures adapt to foreign architecture?

Future Urban City, Lagos

I came across this article about congestion and order/disorder in Lagos in the New Yorker. It struck me that this disorderly, chaotic sewage space with extreme poverty and entrepreneurship is described as the future city state. I also thought it interesting how from Western eyes the structure of this city would leave no room or economic need for physical/psychological private space.

"And what particularly amazes me is how the kinds of infrastructure of modernity in the city trigger off all sorts of unpredictable improvised conditions, so that there is a kind of mutual dependency that rye never seen anywhere else." With its massive traffic jams creating instant markets on roads and highways, Lagos is not "a kind of backward situation," Koolhaas said, but, rather, "an announcement of the future." What he calls "self-organization" is simply collective adaptation to extreme hardship. Traffic pileups lead to "improvised conditions" because there is no other way for most people in Lagos to scratch out a living than to sell on the street. It would be preferable to have some respite from buying and selling, some separation between private and public life. It would be preferable not to have five-hour "go-slows" traffic jam that force many workers to get up well before dawn and spend almost no waking hours at home. And it would be preferable not to have an economy in which millions of people have to invent marginal forms of employment because there are so few jobs.


Informal transactions make up at least sixty per cent of economic activity; at stoplights and on highways, crowds of boys as young as eight hawk everything from cell phones to fire extinguishers. Every square foot is claimed by someone--for selling, for washing, even for sleeping--and there is almost no privacy. Many residents sleep outdoors.

It is currently the sixth-largest city in the world, and it is growing faster than any of the world's other megacities (the term used by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements for "urban agglomerations" with more than ten million people). By 2015, it is projected, Lagos will rank third, behind Tokyo and Bombay, with twenty-three million inhabitants.

From The Megacity, George Packer, 11.22.06 The New Yorker