In Brazil, phone booths are simple and colorful. Their spheroidal shape gives them a well-established identity in the vibrant Brazilian urban landscape. The demise in the use of public phone booths due to the extended use of cell phones, has transformed our perception of these urban objects. But their main design condition, the fact that they are inhabitable, small-scale, enclosed spaces within the larger, public space of the city, still remains unexplored. The questions could be: what could we do with phone booths now that their communication function is not necessary? How do we recycle a whole urban network of truly public individual micro-spaces? If we understand phone booths as man-made public spaces, we could assign them new functions: they provide shelter, temporary refuge and, most importantly, a very special type of privacy and individual isolation (this idea of privacy is clearly manifest in the image above, where the inner surface of the phone booth is used to discretely advertise sexual contacts). The privacy of phone booths is specially unique, one in which the individual is not completely hidden, but somehow visible, yet separated from urban life by a thin layer –sometimes glass, in this case the shape of a thin fiberglass shell, etc. In Maine, USA, there is a proposal to revitalize phone booths by making them free of charge. Looking at the beautiful Brazilian booths, I say the opportunity is to bank on their spatial qualities in a more creative way.
