Orelhão: Brazil's iconic egg-shaped telephone booth

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1971, a female architect called Chu Ming Silveira created Brazil's iconic egg-shaped telephone booth, Orelhão.

More than 50,000 of the booths were installed across Brazil and the design was so successful that other countries decided to use it.

Chu Ming was born in China and moved over to Brazil with her family in 1949, following the end of the Chinese Civil War.

At a time when not many architects were women in the country, she was tasked with creating a design for a cheap, light-weight and visually attractive public phone booth.

Chu Ming died in 1997, aged 58. In 2017, Google decided to celebrate her life by creating a doodle.

Her son, Alan Chu, has been sharing his memories of Chu Ming with Matt Pintus.

(Photo: Chu Ming using an Orelhão phone booth. Credit: Chu Ming Silveira’s Collection - Ouvio.arq.br)

Transcript

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0:44.0	Today, the Chinese woman who created one of Brazil's most recognizable
0:50.0	and beloved pieces of street furniture.
0:52.8	This is the story of the Aurelio Telephone Booth.
0:56.8	It was for us, always there one, it was the prototype, the first one, it was a white one, and it there in our garden.
1:13.0	That's Alan Chu.
1:14.0	He's thinking back to his childhood in late 1970s Sao Paulo, Brazil.
1:19.0	It was very, very common for us, I think for my generation and natural object of the city we used it a lot because there was no cellphones and it's a part of our memories I think.
1:34.0	The object Alan is talking about is one that's very close to his heart.
1:38.0	It's his mom Chuming's legacy, a fixture on Brazilian sidewalks all over the country and it has a very distinctive name.
1:47.0	When it was released it had many names first I think they called Shoe Wun and there was other names like Tulipa
1:56.2	but by the public it was called Aurelian which means big year.
2:02.0	When Alan was growing up, there were more than 50,000 of these big ears across Brazil.
	...

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