Does your high-rise apartment or office tower look like a mobile phone? These ones do, and you can bet smartphone users inside them get REALLY good reception.

Telefónica Chile Building – Santiago, Chile

(image via: Celebrate Big)

The Telefónica Chile Building (Torre Telefónica Chile) in Santiago was designed by architects Seismic A&E and while the firm doesn’t explicitly say so at their website, the structure was clearly intended to house a mobile telecommunications company – in this case, Telefónica Chile (known since 2009 as Movistar).

(images via: Chilling In Chile, Dijitalimaj and Wikimedia/Diego Sepulveda)

The 143 m (469 ft) tall tower’s design was an attempt to ape the appearance of state-of-the-art mid-1990s mobile phones… considering the building opened in December of 1995, we’d say the architects achieved their goal. It’s odd, however, that planners did not foresee the continuing evolution of mobile phone design through the Telefónica Chile Building‘s estimated lifespan and indeed, only a few short years after it opened the design was already looking quite dated.

Omniyat Properties iPad Building – Dubai, UAE

(image via: WIRED)

Don’t let the name “iPad” fool you, this 23-story building concept from Omniyat Properties dates from 2007 and its design was intended to evoke Apple’s iPod MP3 player sitting atop a docking station. If the design doesn’t resemble an iPod upon first glance, keep in mind the edifice will lean back at a six degree angle.

(images via: Roberta’s Blog and LandvestDubai)

Omniyat Properties suspended work on many of its planned building designs as the late-2000s world financial crisis bit into investment budgets, and the iPad was one of those to be put “on hold” until better days arrived. By 2010 the design had been re-named “The Pad” for obvious reasons and according to Omniyat Properties over 50 percent of payments required to re-start work on this and other outstanding projects had been nailed down.

Bic Camera Building – Tokyo, Japan

(image via: Panoramio/alicemarotta)

The Bic Camera building in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district is one of about 40 Bic Camera stores in Japan, though it’s the only one that looks like a cellphone. The building’s facade is actually functional in a way, as the number buttons match the building’s floors and include a short description of what products may be found there.

(images via: Spicykarma and Kirainet)

Oddly for a building shaped like a cellular phone, the Bic Camera building in Ikebukuro does not specialize in mobile phone sales. Instead, this particular location predominantly sells computers, parts, peripheral devices and the like.

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They may not have windows, workers or office space yet telecom infrastructure buildings are an essential part of the urban megalopolis. Their lack of an obvious human presence, though, has made these towering, nondescript boxes of wire and machinery the subjects of mystery, wonderment and conspiracy theories.

AT&T Long Lines Building (33 Thomas Street), Manhattan

http://euphues.tumblr.com/post/2837253379/an-image-of-at-ts-long-lines-building-i-took-this

The AT&T Long Lines Building, or as it’s known now by its street address: 33 Thomas Street was designed by architect John Carl Warnecke and opened in 1974. The building was built to last with the expectation that its granite-over-concrete exterior and integral power generators would protect the machinery inside from a nuclear explosion.

(image via: Michaeln3)

The 550 ft (167.5 m) tall building has only 29 floors because each story has ceilings 18 ft (5.5 meters) high. Odd tubular protrusions on the 10th and 29th floors are for the purpose of ventilating the considerable heat that can build up inside. While often praised for its no-nonsense style that complements other buildings in the area, the stark Brutalist design is a favorite of photographers who wait for lighting conditions that accentuate its “inhuman” aspects.

AT&T Long Lines Building, Kansas City

(images via: Eric Bowers, Wikipedia and KCMeesha)

Another AT&T Long Lines Building, another city, a different design philosophy. Opened in 1976, AT&T’s Kansas City, Missouri telecom building once housed 1,700 workers who manned call centers and helped route the bulk of the region’s long distance phone calls. These days a mere handful of employees rub shoulders with AT&T’s switching equipment in the underutilized yellow brick fortress.

(image via: KCLUVSKC)

At 298 ft (91 meters) and rising 26 stories, the AT&T Long Lines Building at 1425 Oak St. is the 16th-tallest building in Kansas City, so it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

Digital Beijing Building, China

(images via: Galinsky and Coolest Gadgets)

While the USA is still the champ when it comes to wired and wireless telecommunications, the new century has brought new challengers such as China where the Digital Beijing Building offers a new perspective on buildings for non-humans. Designed by Chinese architect Pei Zhu of Studio Pei Zhu/Urbanus, the building opened in 2007 only to be immediately overshadowed by the spectacular neighboring structures built for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games.

(images via: Oobject and We Make Money Not Art)

The 187 ft (57 meter) tall building wasn’t built for show and compared to its neighbors not everyone is a fan of the structure, either. “It is shaped, cheesily, like a mainframe computer from the 1960s, cut with linear glass strips evoking a circuit board,” sneers Tom Dyckhoff of Times Online. “Four gloomy stone slabs, divided by glass atria, do an excellent Orwellian Ministry of Truth impression. It’s slightly less spirit-crushing inside.” Harsh.

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Quick, when was the mobile phone invented? If you thought it was the 1980s, when businessmen lugged them around in giant briefcases, think again. The earliest version of a mobile phone was first created in 1946, evolving into ultra-durable, shock-proof, vacuum-tubed contraptions that mounted to car dashboards by the 1960s.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, mobile radio-based phone systems started in the early 1900’s in the form of ship to shore radio, and some police cars had them by 1921. In 1946, the first “mobile radiophone service” allowing calls from fixed to mobile telephones became available in St. Louis, and by 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the United States.

Radio expert Geoff Fors has exhaustively detailed the history of these phones with a website that chronicles their progress from the 1940s through the ’90s. In the ’40s, radio phones had massive transmitter cabinets and receiver cabinets that had to be mounted in the trunk of the car, with a cable that ran under the carpet to a ‘control head’ on the dash.

Motorola and General Electric stepped in during the 1950s to streamline the equipment, making it smaller and lighter in weight (but still gigantic by today’s standards, of course!) In the ’60s, Motorola’s TLD-1000 was fittingly used in the opening scenes of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

See lots more images including brochures, advertisements and photographs and read all the details about these dino phones at Fors’ website.

Payphones appear to be following the Pony Express down the well-worn path of obsolete technologies and their ubiquitous appearance in urban landscapes rings hollow in the face of today’s cell phone society. Rusting in place for at least a little while longer, the abused carcasses of abandoned payphones echo with lost conversations from a very different time.

Riff Raff Beats UnderDog

(images via: Payphone News)

When you name your company UnderDog Communications, you probably have a good idea of the odds stacked against you. When your business is payphones, you’re probably certain of it. Even so, the Verizon Wireless ad slapped up just above this ungracefully decomposing payphone seems like a slap in the face to someone already down on their luck. Sorry decrepit payphone, not even Underdog can save you now.

Parking Lost

(image via: KenobiwanX)

Give ’em credit, payphone operators didn’t go down without a fight. Take this “Phone From Car” payphone from Grand Haven, Michigan, situated in a… parking lot, of course. Perhaps inspired by the proliferation of drive-thru fast-food outlets, the concept was doomed by inclement weather and the host tenant packing it in. No cars, no calls, no service.

Caged Heat

(images via: Payphone News)

Hang around on 21st Street in Long Island City, New York long enough and you’ll look a little rough around the edges too. Still, this beleaguered beauty is more than showing its age – that’s a rough 19 if there ever was.

(image via: Payphone News)

Caging this payphone in steel mesh didn’t keep the animals out and it couldn’t have been much a noise shield with the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge just a stone’s throw away. Surely its only a matter of time before scrap metal scavengers abscond with the flimsy shield – not that we’re suggesting any such thing.

I’ve Bean Calling You

(images via: Lindsay Palmer)

A payphone revival? In my city? It’s more likely than you think, especially if you’re city is Austin, Texas. The Pay Phone Revival Project focuses on six abandoned payphone booths on the east side of Austin. Artists were asked to re-purpose, re-imagine and re-work the decaying payphones and their associated infrastructure in a creative manner. Lindsay Palmer‘s concept involved building a chicken-wire bean teepee around the phone as a method of “envision(ing) a world in which we as humans have had to return to an agrarian society, and must do so amongst the ruins of our current world.” Gotta nice ring to it, hmm?

San Jose Can You See?

(images via: Lost San Jose)

A relatively newly abandoned payphone outside a recently abandoned supermarket in San Jose, California, hasn’t suffered much from the vagaries of vagrants, vandals and vermin but it’s clear time is not on its side. The image itself presents a studied contrast in colors and tones, imbuing the composition as a whole with life though the scene itself is anything but lively.

Mellow Yellow

(image via: The Upstairs Room)

Gutted of its payphone and its purpose, a pleasant yellow payphone enclosure commiserates with the dandelions outside a closed gas station in Columbus, Ohio. The jaunty designer enclosure echoes the innocence of the Sixties and smiling round Happy Face buttons, dating it firmly in the realm of nostalgia. Reality roughly intrudes on the scene as rusting metal improvised bollards have bent but not broken their vow to protect this forgotten communications outpost.

Book Booth

(images via: LA FWD, Future Studio and 90042)

Highland Park is said to be an L.A. neighborhood beloved by hipsters so when Highland Park resident and artist Amy Inouye of Future Studio Design set out to revitalize an abandoned payphone, she looked back past the telephone itself. Book Booth, located at the Figueroa entrance to La Arca de Noe restaurant (5570 N. Figueroa), has been re-stocked several times. Got extra books? Get your smug on and bring ’em to the Book Booth, you can probably pick up a case of PBR on the way back.

SNETsterday’s Technology

(image via: 06880)

Remember SNET? Southern New England Telephone dated back to 1878 and issued the world’s first telephone book. The company was bought by SBC Communications (“new” AT&T) in 1998 and was folded into their Ameritech brand in 2006. None of this matters to the lonely, de-phoned payphone booth slowly succumbing to rust in Westport, Connecticut. The scene looks so depressing and miserable even graffiti artists avoid it like the plague.

Parakeet Pair o’Phones

(images via: Pay Phone Revival)

Austin’s Payphone Revival Project strikes again! If you’ve ever been at or around the Urban Market at 1905 E 12th Street, then you’ve likely experienced the sight & sound of urban-adapted but non-native Monk Parakeets. Artist K.A. Sheehan sought to invoke “nature’s ongoing adaption to an increasingly man-made and mediated landscape” by beautifying a pair of abandoned payphones with wheat paste, screen printing and gold leaf with a Monk Parakeet theme.

Praise the Lord & Pass Me a Quarter

(image via: The Post-Pessimist Association)

The vaguely disturbing image above depicts the abandoned Midtown Church of Christ (Charles Spence Jr., Evangelist) in Atlanta, Georgia. The stylish (for 1963) structure seems to anchor a surrealistic world of leaning power poles and swaying signs as mutant green vegetation grabs an uncontested foothold on the parking lot. As for the curious placement of the payphone right in front of the building’s front doors, well, it poses questions we’re reluctant to even consider answering… and that goes double for the phone itself.

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Classic static telephone booths are slowly fading from the urban landscape but talking on the phone has never been more popular. These 12 concept mobile phone telephone booths attempt to recapture the personal isolation those old public phones provided while enhancing the experience of conversing in the city.

Portable Cellular Phone Booth

(image via: Nick Rodrigues)

No discussion of portable cellular phone booths would be complete without the Portable Cellular Phone Booth, a one-off “sculpture” crafted from stainless steel, aluminum and polycarbonate. Though it dates from 2002, Rodrigues’ art object perfectly captures that pivotal moment in societal history when mobile phones began to nose landlines out of the picture.

(images via: Gawker and Nick Rodrigues)

Measuring 16″ X 24″ X 36″, the device collapses down to flat-pack dimensions and can be worn on the user’s back much like a backpack or rucksack, only harder and heavier. When a call comes in, simply unfold and insert one’s head – and try to ignore the amused, bemused and confused stares of onlookers.

Silence Chair

(images via: SilenceChair.com and Sensory Impact)

The Silence Chair from Finnish designer Antti Evävaara offers mobile phone users a comfortable personal space within which to chat. At the same time, the chair’s safety glass side panels ensure the sound of the conversation doesn’t intrude upon others.

(image via: Masty Wizdom)

Available in up to 67 different colors spread across a range of 6 different styles, the Silence Chair is designed for use in airports, lobbies, lounges, meeting rooms and libraries – the latter is the scene of the image above. Note the sticker on the side glass indicating the suggested use as a cell phone communication station.

Hush Cone

(image via: Design Buzz)

The Hush Cone, designed by Miles Thornley of Brown Kiwi, re-imagines the classic outdoor public phone booth for 21st century modes of mobile communication. While dispensing with the pricey wiring and the landline phone of old, the organically shaped fiberglass booth maintains the sense of visual and acoustic privacy that mobile phone users often find missing in urban environs.

The Cell Atlantic CellBooth

(images via: JennyLC)

The Cell Atlantic CellBooth (the name is a throwback to the good old days of Bell Labs) from artist Jenny L Chowdhury takes Nick Rodrigues’ personal phone booth concept and lightens it up a little. Like Rodrigues’ blocky booth, the Cell Atlantic CellBooth is worn knocked-down on one’s back but easily unfolds when a call needs to be made or taken.

(images via: JennyLC)

The insta-booth employs so-called “Third World Samsonite”, that plaid, stiff & shiny pseudo-fabric usually seen lining wheeled pushcarts sold from dollar stores. The fabric is light, tough and resists water in case the user’s caught outdoors in stormy weather.

The Veasyble

(images via: 2Modern)

Phone booth meets fashion? The Veasyble (with the emphasis on the “easy”) designed by Gloria Pizzilli, Arianna Petrakis, Ilaria Pacini and Adele Bacci appears to be an attempt to make the accordion cool again, assuming the accordion was ever cool that is. Combine it with Pac-Man and you’ve got a polyethylene, paper and fabric isolation chamber than can be shared by two in a pinch… ouch!

Prooff PhoneBox

(images via: Mathieu Gabiot and Contemporan)

You can knock down the traditional wall of telephone booths lining the walls of busy train stations, airports and the like but travelers still need a place to make their mobile phone calls. Enter Mathieu Gabiot’s Prooff PhoneBox, a truncated version of the old-style full length booth that serves basically the same purpose: providing a sound-sheltered environment where one can hear and be heard.

(image via: Apres Furniture)

Described by its makers as an “Acoustic Mobile Phone Booth”, the Prooff PhoneBox can be mounted singly or in ranks depending on the site and situation. It economical design focuses on the small space around the caller’s head: that’s where the speaking and listening goes on, after all.

Pentaphone Isolation Space

(images via: DesignBoom)

Austrian designer Robert Stadler conceived the Pentaphone as a vertically adjustable isolation space that doubles as an intriguing piece of indoor furniture. Crafted from stained and varnished wood panels lined with acoustically absorbent foam, the Pentaphone may look more than a little sci-fi but why not? It’s hard to get any quieter than being in outer space.

Corniche des Chapeaux

(images via: Benedetto Bufalino and Textualy.org)

Is it a stretch to call Corniche des Chapeaux a mobile phone booth? Perhaps, but let’s just keep it under our oversized hats, shall we? This collaboration between artist/designers Benedetto Bufalino and Victor Vieillard saw a series of colorful hats line the waterfront of Marseille, France, in June of 2007.

(images via: Benedetto Bufalino and Ma-Buse)

Besides serving as cozy, convenient spaces for mobile phone communication, the hats functioned as sunshades during the day and reading spaces by night thanks to integrated lighting.

The Mobile Phone Booth

(images via: Design Quarters News)

Designer Alain Gilles has come up with the Mobile Phone Booth, a wall-mounted personal space similar in many ways to the Prooff PhoneBox. The Mobile Phone Booth is larger, however, and includes an integral inner shelf to rest one’s communication device of choice… or one’s arm.

CellZone Cell Phone Booth

(images via: Softpedia)

The CellZone “Bring Your Own Phone” Cell Phone Booth from Salemi Industries looks a lot like the traditional telephone booth it’s meant to replace. Coincidence? We think not – and neither does US Cellular, who’ve seen fit to install a few CellZones (renamed “Chatter Box”) at US Cellular Stadium… where else?

(images via: UMass and Softpedia)

The cylindrical, transparent-doored booths look a little like those message capsules used in pneumatic tube delivery systems but not to fear: you won’t end up like a Futurama character should you step inside one. On the contrary, you’ll stay put but your mobile phone messages will do the traveling for you.

PARCS Phone Booth

(images via: Archiproducts)

The PARCS Phone Booth is a mobile office partition designed by PearsonLloyd. Functioning as an acoustically and visually shielded private space within public areas, the PARCS Phone Booth creates a head-to-toe sonic cocoon that offers silence to both the user and those who work nearby.

The Cone of Silence

http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/blogs/gwen/its-time-get-smart-and-remove-cone-silence

Designers of mobile phone booths have shown they’re long on creativity but short on practicality – a forgivable foible, as the concept of creating space for mobile conversations is mainly untested in the real world… or is it? The classic 1960s spy comedy Get Smart featured the Cone of Silence, an awkward and ineffective acrylic double-bubble affair meant to conceal top-secret conversations between Maxwell Smart and the Chief of CONTROL.

(images via: Alistair Cockburn, Tiki Lounge & Bar and TV Acres)

The flawed device was also available in a portable version for two and the “Umbrella of Silence” for groups. An idea ahead of its time? Perhaps, and not the show’s only one… Agent 86’s preferred mode of mobile communication was his shoe. “Smart phone” indeed.