Contestants in New York City’s Reinvent Payphones contest might want to look for inspiration from unlikely sources: How about the boneyard? That’s where Sir Gilbert Scott looked when he developed the iconic K2 Phone Box.
According to Vaguely Interesting (a not-so-vaguely-interesting web site):
“…the design of the UK’s world famous red telephone boxes was inspired by a nineteenth century tomb. [Gilbert Scott’s] design was inspired by the central domed structure of [Sir John] Soane’s tomb and was chosen as the winner. Thus a structure heavily drawing on Soane’s sepulchral designs would soon be found in every town and many villages across the country.”
Read more at Calling from the grave at VaguelyInteresting.co.uk.
New York wants to keep payphones around because they actually make the city a fair amount of money. Revenue comes from display advertising on the kiosks and enclosures.
Thus it would not surprise me to see full-sized phone booths or larger multi-purpose public cabinets among the entries in New York’s payphone design contest. An old-fashioned phone booth with 3 walls and a closing door offers more real estate for advertising than most of today’s models.
All this lipstick-on-the-pig would do nothing to improve call quality or functionality of the phones, though fuller physical coverage might better protect the devices from elements and casual vandalism.
A nostalgia factor may exist for some who think phone booths were cool. Such sentiments would not come from me. I am no nostalgian to begin with (I consider most nostalgia a tiresome form of bitterness) but phone booths in particular were almost always unpleasant places which did (now that you mention it) feel like coffins. Some of the worst calls I’ve made in my life came from phone booths.
The last time I checked there were only 4 outdoor phone booths left in Manhattan. I define “phone booth” as a structure the frame of which reaches completely to the ground and includes a door that closes. Those booths (all on West End Avenue) are usually unplastered with ads, but I noticed last year that the booth at 66th Street and West End Avenue had been almost entirely wrapped in advertising.
Similar structures with LED panels rotating infinite ads ad nauseum, perhaps serving up contextually-targeted ads based on the conversations of passers-by, might also pass through the consciousnesses of payphone reinventors. We saw something like that a year ago (minus the contextually-targetted part) when Titan introduced digital display advertising panels on some of their Times Square payphone enclosures.
A new design which sells display advertising both inside and out might help subsidize public telephones to the point where payphones could be free phones, as I think they should be in places of high foot traffic.
Will the phone booth of the future be a wrap-around billboard, or a multi-faced kaleidoscopic tube of infinite digital advertisements?
I do not know.