a hint of halfslant

We’ve been thinking about the phone booth lately. It’s one of the strangest yet most accepted private spaces in a city. It’s for public use, but owned or operated by a private company. It’s not particularly regulated but there are social protocols for its use.

Phone booths come in many shapes and sizes, offering various levels of privacy and space, and are a magnet for street art, installations and advertisements.

The phone booth as an art space allows an artist to directly interact with an intimate audience (1 or 2 people), yet engage them in an everyday location. There is the added functionality of the phone system itself, the walls or structure and of the surrounding street space.

Have any good examples of phone booth art? Tweet @halfslant or email us at begin [at] halfslant.com

February 14, 2009, 1:19pm

top: Arc de la Défense, Paris, France (1990 CE), bottom: Regtisan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan (circa 1400 CE)

Nearly five hundred years and several cultures apart, it’s amazing how similair the ideas behind these structures are. There’s a very obvious need for the negative space, the long and wide flat area is probably the most important thing for the designs to succeed. But not only does the large empty square allow the arc and the Registan to feel monumental, it also provides a breezeway through both structures.

What makes the impression is not the enormous stature of the buildings, but their apparent depth and the sense of solidity that is created from that depth.

February 06, 2009, 4:03pm

Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut was built in 1949 and stands as one of the most famous icons of Modernism in architecture. The Glass House itself is just one of many buildings on a sprawling plot of land- in a sense it is the living room of an outdoor house.   Since the Glass House itself had an overwhelming amount of visual distraction for Johnson he would often escape to the cleverly named and constructed Brick House, a dark, private and plush play pen.   His study has no windows: just a skylight and books. The bunker of his painting collection is a temple to Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.  The Sculpture collection is housed in brick, glass and white walls inspired by Greek sea side villages.

If you could pick a building for each type of activity you do at home or in life, rather than just a room, what would each one look like?

February 01, 2009, 4:03pm