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John Soane\u2019s tomb: a familiar outline. (Photo by Jim Dyson\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
The simple but elegant design, laid atop an industrial glass and iron box, gave birth to a form that is now iconic. Today, it is ubiquitous to Britain\u2019s aesthetic in the national and global imagination. A century later, the society-rupturing technology of the day is artificial intelligence. Thoughtful observers might ask: can we once again create elegant and rooted aesthetic forms that encase cutting-edge technologies in ways that spark joy and connection?<\/p>\n
Scott came from a family of great Victorian architects whose work attempted to tame technological upheaval. Techno-industrial revolutionaries had made Britain into the workshop of the world, sowing deep division in the process. Scott\u2019s grandfather George attempted to temper the culture war by dressing modernity in Gothic revivalist architecture with a Christian face. The red brick fa\u00e7ade of the hotel at St Pancras Railway Station, near Soane\u2019s Tomb, typifies his approach. The hotel\u2019s elaborate Gothic structure, echoing the cathedrals of yore, was designed as a counterbalance to William Henry Barlow\u2019s epic iron-and-glass railway hall.<\/p>\n
Decades later, in contrast to his grandfather\u2019s Gothic shield against modernity, Giles took a different track. In an address to the Royal Institute for British Architects, Scott described his grand architectural theory of a \u201cmiddle line\u201d between the traditionalists and modernists. He said: \u201cI\u00a0want\u00a0to\u00a0see [Modernism\u2019s] best features and characteristics\u00a0retained and grafted at\u00a0first onto the architecture of the past and\u00a0then gradually developed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through this \u201cmiddle line\u201d, the architectural historian Gavin Stamp argues, Scott found a compromise that gave his clients cutting-edge aesthetics while also building with traditional forms and materials to blend into the fabric of the built environment. Another critic, David Frazer Lewis, compares Scott\u2019s philosophy to G.K. Chesterton\u2019s theory that Christianity resolved its furious tensions by allowing \u201ctwo opposite flames burning brightly\u201d. By creating designs that could be everything at once, Lewis argues, Scott seamlessly synthesized the modern, traditional, abstract, and archaeological into a new vision of the future.<\/p>\n
The K2 is the perfect embodiment of Scott\u2019s middle line. The Soane-inspired dome is formed by a vaulted roof cut from a hemisphere. Its four sides are gently ornamented with striking reeded strips above and fluted architraves below. These border a shallow inner patera which houses the \u201cTELEPHONE\u201d sign. The body features a grid of cast iron with rows of small panes of glass \u2014\u00a0which magically code as both Victorian factory and Georgian sash windows.<\/p>\n
Rather than replicate the grandeur of Soane\u2019s neo-classical embellishments, Scott avoided ornament that could be broken off. Instead, he delicately perforated holes in the shape of the King\u2019s crown, simultaneously creating a ventilation system. The red paint, meanwhile, was not Scott\u2019s choice. While he suggested silver with green interiors, the Post Office chose red to align with their post boxes.<\/p>\n
Manufactured at various ironworks across Falkirk and Kirkintilloch, the K2 proliferated around London as demand for telephones skyrocketed. For King George V\u2019s Jubilee in 1935, Scott was recalled to re-design a later iteration, the smaller K6 kiosk. Seeking evolution over revolution, he simplified the detailing and windows further and the K6 spread to the rest of the nation. When Scott died in 1960, there were 60,000 kiosks dotted across the country.<\/p>\n
In the century following the K2 boom, the kiosks have been on something of a journey. While the K6<\/a>, standing a little shorter with a wider central window pane, was a great success, the rise of domestic and then mobile phones gradually rendered them useless. The box\u2019s successors, such as British Telecom\u2019s hideous KX design<\/a>, were loathed by the public. BT attempted to reimagine them as a \u201cStreet Hub\u201d WiFi network, but campaigners are nevertheless trying to root them out<\/a> of the nation\u2019s pavements.<\/p>\n Yet many of Scott\u2019s kiosks are still in rude health. Nearly three thousand are now listed monuments of national heritage, and many have taken on new lives. They are homes for defibrillators, mini libraries, caf\u00e9s, public art works<\/a>, smartphone repair shops<\/a>, a pub<\/a>, the world\u2019s smallest nightclub<\/a> \u2014\u00a0the possibilities are endless. The dividend for investing in timelessness is a return that compounds through each reinvention.<\/p>\n How has the K2 endured, despite its technological obsolescence? To a more trad-inclined critic, the kiosk\u2019s success is evidence of the Scrutonian adage that if you \u201cput beauty first, what you do will be\u00a0useful\u00a0forever. It turns out nothing is more\u00a0useful\u00a0than the\u00a0useless.\u201d\u00a0Yet the K2 has survived not simply because it\u2019s a pretty red box. Countless other beautiful constructions have failed to stand the test of time.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are deeper forces sustaining the K2, even if the kiosk\u2019s power to unite a nation is somewhat paradoxical.\u201d<\/p>\n There are deeper forces sustaining the K2, even if the kiosk\u2019s power to unite a nation is somewhat paradoxical. The telephone connected the Edwardians to those far away, but it also had the potential to detach them from our physical world, thus beginning the atomization that has since been accelerated by the mobile phone. Like all technology, the telephone was not a neutral tool. It detached live voice from an in-person body, rendering it instead as sound that could come from any corner of the globe.\u00a0Suddenly, as if by magic, one was free to connect to others miles away, but also to disconnect from one\u2019s immediate world.<\/p>\n In his 1985 classic No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz fuses the media theory of Marshall McLuhan with Erving Goffman\u2019s sociology of face-to-face behavior to explain how electronic media warp our sense of place. Meyrowitz argues that the ancient bond between where you are and how you experience the world is severed by electronic communications. For all of human history, physical place has governed what you knew and how you behaved with those around you. This \u201csituational geography\u201d, as Meyrowitz calls it, dictates the norms and possibilities of a given place.\u00a0 A courtroom makes you behave formally, a pub is convivial, and a church could make you reverent.<\/p>\n Electronic media like telephones do strange things to that experience. Once information can fly in from elsewhere, the physical boundaries that guide behavior start to melt. With a phone or the internet, one could be in church while also being in a warzone or at a football match. This renders us, Meyrowitz argues, \u201cmore informed but less rooted\u201d. Indeed it can happen to a nation as well as an individual. On a grand scale, the complex web of institutions held together by language, custom and print media could start to dissolve.<\/p>\n Rather than accelerate this dissolution, the K2 delayed it. What could have been an avatar of placelessness instead became a shared source of national unity, one that drew on and refashioned a common, recognizable, and rooted vernacular. A century later, wherever one is in Britain, the K2 \u2014 along with post boxes, hedgerows, and drystone walls \u2014 is the ultimate reminder that one is somewhere, not nowhere.<\/p>\n Today we stand at a similar crossroads. This time it is artificial intelligence that threatens the further erasure of our sense of place. Information is no longer located in just physical (or virtual) paper, books, places, or people. Rather, it now floods out from a chatbot in streams of text seemingly from everywhere and nowhere.<\/p>\n A skeptical public increasingly sees AI as a parasitical amorphous intelligence, poised to strangle them with surveillance, job losses, even techno-apocalypse. Once again, some companies seeking AI proliferation are invoking vague noises about \u201cculture\u201d and \u201ctaste\u201d to prime consumers to welcome their technologies.<\/p>\n Yet, electronic media\u2019s form has shape-shifted in the last century. Mobile computing has pushed physical infrastructure mostly out of sight \u2014 though backlash against ugly data centers has sparked the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, to incentivize architects to dream bigger. His glitzy new data center design prize<\/a> might encourage more humane design.<\/p>\n Data centers, of course, are rarely our most direct physical experience of the digital age. The smartphone has become the primary human interface for computing \u2014 but that might not last. In June, Paul Graham, the founder of the legendary Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y-Combinator, observed: \u201cNo one knows yet what the next form factor for computing will be, and yet there will be a next form factor, and it will seem obvious in retrospect.\u201d<\/p>\n Some candidates are beginning to emerge. Meta is starting with eyeglasses, tapping into fashion culture by borrowing the valor of Ray-Ban and Oakley\u2019s iconic designs and partnering with Kylie Jenner<\/a>. Buying iconicity may temporarily work, but has borrowed valor ever endured? OpenAI, meanwhile, is betting on earbuds, hiring the iPhone-designing superstar Sir Jony Ive to build Dime. A recent stealth advert<\/a> suggests the buds will live in a steel case resembling a space-age Anish Kapoor sculpture. In its deliberately futuristic design, the case oozes a familiar, clean rootlessness that may no longer inspire jaded consumers in the way early iPhones did. Meta and OpenAI are big enough companies that their new products will sell well. But whether those products will become timeless is doubtful.<\/p>\n Back in London, the voice AI firm ElevenLabs is taking Scott\u2019s wisdom very literally. Rather than chase modernity, the startup is experimenting with a tried and tested model: the K2 telephone box itself. By training an AI mimicking Sir Michael Caine\u2019s voice, then embedding it in an old-style phone within a replica K2<\/a>, Eleven Labs has won hearts, minds, and eyeballs. Paying tribute to Scott\u2019s great aesthetic innovation is a welcome act, if not quite the same as doing the painstaking work required to become the true heirs to his \u201cmiddle line\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead, it is perhaps a small Swedish design studio that could one day prove Scott\u2019s heir. Founded in 2005, Teenage Engineering makes musical synthesizers. They constantly play with form and function, rooting new devices in culture and history. Their medieval \u201cInstrumentalis Electronicum<\/a>\u201d weds medieval design to the warm functionalism of Dieter Rams, while the Riddim \u2018n\u2019 Ting<\/a> sampler plays with Jamaican dancehall aesthetics. The firm has since branched into wooden doll choirs<\/a> and reinvented the Polaroid<\/a>. Teenage Engineering\u2019s cult following won them the job of co-designing Rabbit\u2019s R1, a toy-like, AI-native computer styled after Eighties gaming. The R1 flopped, since it arrived too early for the AI boom and its Eighties-style plastic gave the appearance of cheapness. Yet the firm\u2019s restless thirst for combining experimentation with roots shows how one can keep the best of modern design while borrowing the beloved ideas of the past. This could well lead Teenage Engineering to Scott\u2019s promised land.<\/p>\n A hundred years on, the battles over the aesthetics of modern life rage on: glass towers versus Georgian townhouses, tailored versus sprayed-on suits, serif versus sans serif fonts. The argument will never stop. Yet the true heir to Scott will neither pick a side nor lazily approximate a middle ground. The harmony at the heart of the K2 comes from a delicate thoughtfulness, a commitment to crafting something that shields us from the rupturing force of technology, while also rooting us in a shared story. Those roots might come from a local vernacular, or simply from an earlier, less inhumane era of computing. For now, Scott\u2019s throne is there for the taking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the old St Pancras graveyard nestled behind King\u2019s Cross, there is a tomb. 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\nRed telephone boxes immediately mark a scene as British. (Richard Baker\/In Pictures Ltd\/Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n