Electric utility boxes don’t have to look utilitarian and these creatively painted examples illustrate art’s power to beautify urban neighborhoods.

What’s in the box? Your guess is as good as Amy Johnquest’s and since she was the artist commissioned to paint this utility box in Easthampton, MA, she oughta know! Situated at 50 Payson Avenue, the artwork approved by the Easthampton City Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council was completed in August of 2015

Johnquest’s bold interpretation of the utility box’s innards is “suggestive of a circus poster” according to the Photo-ops blog but one must admit, the design is both appealing and timeless. Well, except for the date.

Pleasanton Gets Pleasanter

In the summer of 2014, the City of Pleasanton’s Community Services Department, Civic Arts Division introduced Project Paint Box. The first phase of the program invited selected local artists to transform 6 traffic utility boxes in and around the downtown area into bonafide works of art. One of the chosen artists, Lisa Hoffman, brings us a rare two-fer: “The Outlet” and “Florescent Bulb”, which can be found just off Telegraph Avenue at 30th Street.

Articulating Culture With Art

The city of Calgary, Canada “is still trying to articulate without artifice, its natural history, environment and cultural heritage beyond just cowboys and oil wells,” according to Jean of the Cycle Write Blog. One way of accomplishing this noble aim is to enlist local artists to express their vision of the Canadian city’s culture through their art – via city-owned electric utility boxes. Above are both sides of such a box located near the Erlton LRT station.

Municipal Manifestation

Commissioned by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, artist Mona Caron’s “Manifestation Station” projects a visionary streetscape onto a utility vault at the intersection of Church St. and Duboce Ave. While striking in and of itself, Caron’s artwork works on a number of levels.

“If you look at this box from a specific point and distance,” the artist explains, “its perspective lines will match the background, providing a glimpse into an alternative reality.” Compounding the illusion, an earlier installation by Caron entitled “Duboce Bikeway Mural” can be seen spreading across the Safeway store’s left front facade.

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Art Of Power 12 Visually Shocking Electric Utility Boxes

A long-standing design proposal from Foster + Partners has been scrapped by developers in favor of a new scheme from BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) that presents a different face to viewers depending on their approach or view within the city, rejecting conventional skyscraper typology and cultivating visual transitions between neighborhoods on all sides.

As the last project slated to be built on the World Trade Center site, the would-be 2 WTC skyscraper is a critical piece of the Lower Manhattan landscape, but its future tenants wanted something that stood apart from the more straightforward tall buildings associated with finance and Wall Street.

The prior scheme, shown above, featured four connected verticals, each terminating in an angled plane at the top, essentially a tower with slots centrally located along each face. The new scheme, endorsed by occupants including 21st Century Fox and News Corp and shown below, intentionally shies away from the skyscraper aesthetic and creates space for greenery on a series of platforms created by recessed sections of structure.

Its facade shows off a slim and modest structure when viewed from the memorial site on one side below but creates a stacked-box effect when seen from adjacent lower-rise parts of the city above like Tribeca: “From Tribeca, it will appear like a vertical village of singular buildings each tailored to their individual activities stacked on top of each other, forming parks and plazas in the sky.”

By keeping larger boxes at the base and similar overall square footage (nearly 3,000,000 square feet), the building also is designed to accommodate sizable studio spaces for the aforementioned media companies. Lower levels will be occupied by these giants while upper floors will be rented out to smaller commercial clients. Set alongside One, Three and Four World Trade Center, this structure will stand apart, its broken-down scale visually bridging the gap between the southern tip of the island and the rest of the city to the north.

Magnetized to stick together when you arrange them, these boxes take LEGO-style furniture construction to a new level by leaving exposed surfaces connector-free in any configuration.

Dubbed the BOB system by its creator, Paul Kelley, the component cubes themselves are durable but light and clad in copper that will weather differently over time depending on which surfaces are exposed.

The magnets inside them are designed to let you create anything you can imagine, from chairs, benches, stools and tables to interior space dividers or simply abstract sculptures. Their attraction is strong enough (and the boxes sufficiently lightweight) to allow limited cantilevers as well.

This work is being publicly displayed as part of the London Design Festival (via Inhabitat)- hopefully its creator will also allow the public to play with and reconfigure the exhibit, keeping it fun and interactive. Fans of magnetic furniture designs should be sure to check out this tensile floating table as well, which works on similar but reversed principles, repelling rather than attracting the constituent boxes.

Together, Hari & Deepti (Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker) turn sets of two-dimensional cutouts into vivid and haunting three-dimensional dioramas, often set in shadowy fantasy spaces.

Despite the darkness of their subject matter, in ordinary lighting conditions there is almost nothing to be seen of these pieces. The work waits in the shadows, so to speak, popping out when you turn out the lights and turn on the LEDs inside each individual light box.

Loosely analogous to a book, perhaps, the story plays out in the space between the pages, each one individually flat but, together with illumination, adding up to something more than the sum of its parts.

While most of their works are relatively small, a recent project challenged them to build at a much bigger scale, creating an entirely monstrous (pun intended) New York cityscape (shown below).

From the artists: “Paper is brutal in its simplicity as a medium. It demands the attention of the artist while it provides the softness they need to mold it in to something beautiful. It is playful, light, colorless and colorful. It is minimal and intricate. It reflects light, creates depth and illusions in a way that it takes the artist through a journey with limitless possibilities.”

Electrical boxes beware – Evol is back to up to his old tricks, turning urban fixtures and unused walls into tiny cityscapes using a deceptively simple toolbox comprised of cardboard, stencils and spray paint.

From process to execution, this artist is both scrappy and calculating, employing quick-and-dirty materials that are easy to obtain and fast to install, but with a remarkable eye for detail, right down to windows, balconies, satellite dishes and flower pots.

Dotting the sidewalks of Berlin, perhaps aptly at the urban intersection of where communist East once met democratic West, the faux structures themselves are almost relentlessly monotonous from a distance. The facades are just drab and generic enough style-wise to look (perhaps ironically) incredibly lifelike and believable.

Up close, these sprayed-in-place or pasted-on building faces exhibit not only convincing architectural details but also anticipated (yet always-unpredictable) marks of weathering, which in turn reinforce their apparent realism.

Le Corbusier, who many blame for the preponderance of ugly mass-produced architecture born of mid-century urban renewal, called buildings “machines for living in.” For better or worse, Evol seems content to continue this tradition at a smaller scale, relentlessly building whole cities worth of micro-machine habitats.