What up, peeps?
Hey, Sport. Do you have that book I lent you?
Telephone booths are obsolete and ubiquitous. While I think it’s a good idea to have land lines I can operate with a quarter sprinkled throughout urban environments, few people agree. What if my phone dies? What if it was stolen? What if I couldn’t afford a cell phone? In many towns and cities, public payphones have already disappeared. Clearly the arguments are many and strong, but that war is already over…sort of…
In New York City, there 13,659 phone booths despite the fact that cell phone density in the place is epic. Is anyone using them? Does anyone need them? Should they be torn down or should they be re-purposed?
In one of the most kick-ass art/architecture stunts I’ve seen in a long time, this Columbia architecture grad is converting Gotham’s lonely phone booths into community libraries one rad set of bookshelves at a time.
Via The Atlantic Cities:
John Locke thinks people should read more. So in the past few months, the Columbia architecture grad has slipped around Manhattan with a sack of books and custom-made shelves, converting old pay phones into pop-up libraries.
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The concept, sponsored by Locke’s imaginary Department of Urban Betterment, is that New Yorkers will pick up unfamiliar titles while running their errands and then, perhaps, replace them the next day with favorite books of their own. That’s in an ideal world. Of the two guerrilla libraries that the artist has fashioned, one has been used properly while the other has had its entire collection repeatedly ganked by sticky-fingered pedestrians. Its shelves were also stolen.
But Locke has many more libraries planned. With plywood consoles that slip over payphones as neatly as aprons, these sidewalk objets are endlessly replicable. (No doubt they’ll feature in his 2012 Columbia course, “Hacking the Urban Experience.”) I caught up with Locke over the weekend to ask him about what was and wasn’t working with these literary outposts, as well as why he started the project in the first place. Here’s what he had to say…
Read more after your call gets connected…
Joe Nolan <3
Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!
