Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the first K2 — or “Kiosk no.2” — was designed by another titan of British architecture, Giles Gilbert Scott. In his submission to a contest run by the Royal Fine Art Commission, Scott wanted to design a kiosk that used tradition to close the cultural rupture created by the telephone and networked modernity. A trustee of the Soane Museum, Scott borrowed the tomb’s distinctive neo-classical dome.

John Soane’s tomb: a familiar outline. (Photo by Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

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’s 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?

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’s grandfather George attempted to temper the culture war by dressing modernity in Gothic revivalist architecture with a Christian face. The red brick façade of the hotel at St Pancras Railway Station, near Soane’s Tomb, typifies his approach. The hotel’s elaborate Gothic structure, echoing the cathedrals of yore, was designed as a counterbalance to William Henry Barlow’s epic iron-and-glass railway hall.

Decades later, in contrast to his grandfather’s 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 “middle line” between the traditionalists and modernists. He said: “I want to see [Modernism’s] best features and characteristics retained and grafted at first onto the architecture of the past and then gradually developed.”

Through this “middle line”, 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’s philosophy to G.K. Chesterton’s theory that Christianity resolved its furious tensions by allowing “two opposite flames burning brightly”. 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.

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The K2 is the perfect embodiment of Scott’s 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 “TELEPHONE” sign. The body features a grid of cast iron with rows of small panes of glass — which magically code as both Victorian factory and Georgian sash windows.

Rather than replicate the grandeur of Soane’s neo-classical embellishments, Scott avoided ornament that could be broken off. Instead, he delicately perforated holes in the shape of the King’s crown, simultaneously creating a ventilation system. The red paint, meanwhile, was not Scott’s choice. While he suggested silver with green interiors, the Post Office chose red to align with their post boxes.

Manufactured at various ironworks across Falkirk and Kirkintilloch, the K2 proliferated around London as demand for telephones skyrocketed. For King George V’s 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.

In the century following the K2 boom, the kiosks have been on something of a journey. While the K6, 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’s successors, such as British Telecom’s hideous KX design, were loathed by the public. BT attempted to reimagine them as a “Street Hub” WiFi network, but campaigners are nevertheless trying to root them out of the nation’s pavements.

Yet many of Scott’s 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, cafés, public art works, smartphone repair shops, a pub, the world’s smallest nightclub — the possibilities are endless. The dividend for investing in timelessness is a return that compounds through each reinvention.

How has the K2 endured, despite its technological obsolescence? To a more trad-inclined critic, the kiosk’s success is evidence of the Scrutonian adage that if you “put beauty first, what you do will be useful forever. It turns out nothing is more useful than the useless.” Yet the K2 has survived not simply because it’s a pretty red box. Countless other beautiful constructions have failed to stand the test of time.

There are deeper forces sustaining the K2, even if the kiosk’s 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. Suddenly, as if by magic, one was free to connect to others miles away, but also to disconnect from one’s immediate world.

In his 1985 classic No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz fuses the media theory of Marshall McLuhan with Erving Goffman’s 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 “situational geography”, as Meyrowitz calls it, dictates the norms and possibilities of a given place.  A courtroom makes you behave formally, a pub is convivial, and a church could make you reverent.

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, “more informed but less rooted”. 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.

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 — along with post boxes, hedgerows, and drystone walls — is the ultimate reminder that one is somewhere, not nowhere.

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.

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 “culture” and “taste” to prime consumers to welcome their technologies.

Yet, electronic media’s form has shape-shifted in the last century. Mobile computing has pushed physical infrastructure mostly out of sight — 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 might encourage more humane design.

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 — but that might not last. In June, Paul Graham, the founder of the legendary Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y-Combinator, observed: “No 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.”

Some candidates are beginning to emerge. Meta is starting with eyeglasses, tapping into fashion culture by borrowing the valor of Ray-Ban and Oakley’s iconic designs and partnering with Kylie Jenner. 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 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.

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Back in London, the voice AI firm ElevenLabs is taking Scott’s 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’s voice, then embedding it in an old-style phone within a replica K2, Eleven Labs has won hearts, minds, and eyeballs. Paying tribute to Scott’s 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 “middle line”.

Instead, it is perhaps a small Swedish design studio that could one day prove Scott’s 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 “Instrumentalis Electronicum” weds medieval design to the warm functionalism of Dieter Rams, while the Riddim ‘n’ Ting sampler plays with Jamaican dancehall aesthetics. The firm has since branched into wooden doll choirs and reinvented the Polaroid. Teenage Engineering’s cult following won them the job of co-designing Rabbit’s 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’s 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’s promised land.

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’s throne is there for the taking.

And sometimes it is filled with visitors. It is the marriage of the two constructs, chapel and data center, and the unusual power of the apparatus within the stone walls, that give this site its appeal. It is something sorely lacking in Torre Girona’s rather less lovely cousins: the thousands of data centers now under urgent worldwide construction.

In Britain, America, and the West at large, data centers are loathed. So deep is this public opprobrium that, since 2023, $85bn of American data-center projects have been canceled. From Fife to Devon, similar revolts are underway in Britain. In East London, the former Truman Brewery will now, thanks to an intervention by the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, become the scene of a redevelopment that includes a data center — but not without incurring the anger of local mandarins and campaigners.

The Truman Brewery project had its own local difficulties, but any given data center development will tend to arouse a predictable set of complaints. One accusation is that data centers overuse energy, which is used to power the computing equipment and keep it cool; another is that they overuse water, which is another component of some data centers’ cooling systems.

The accusations are sometimes misleading. Data centers’ use of water is overstated, and modern cooling systems use less than older ones. Data centers are hungry for energy, but they are responsible for only a tiny proportion of Western nations’ energy use. It’s true that our decrepit and highly regulated power grids are ill-placed to increase their capacity by even 1% per year — but our paralysis has caused tech barons to invest, with notable success, in geothermal, nuclear and even fusion power. Hyperscalers’ data centers might yet spur considerable improvements in the provision of clean energy.

Protesters stand on firmer ground when they complain about noise (data centers hum incessantly, and roar when they resort to generators), jobs (once data centers are completed, they don’t need many people per square foot), slop (where did you think those AI-generated videos are made?) and their own economic obsolescence. The most powerful AI models, those that are already beginning to automate human labor, are trained, of course, in data centers. In the late-18th century, the Luddites were driven to fury by industrial looms that were human-operated. Imagine how furious they would have been if the looms needed no human hand at all — or were designed to automate all human labor entirely. That, of course, is the promise, or threat, of today’s frontier labs.

Still, the neo-Luddite pitchforks might not need dusting off just yet. The labor market currently appears more resilient, what with all the premiums it places on tacit knowledge and in-person competence, than pessimists might have feared — at least for now. The defenders of data centers can also argue that their output isn’t entirely slop. Data centers are also important infrastructure in humanity’s endeavors to discover new industrial materials, improve computational biology, and maintain miraculous but quotidian services such as Google Maps, cloud storage, and accurate weather forecasts. They will also be central to the brewing revolution in robotics. Finally, there is the more Molochian argument that if someone’s going to build the data centers, and therefore collect the tax receipts and seize some geopolitical leverage, it might as well be the British. 

But it is understandable that the public has reservations — and if Big Tech is worthy of the public’s suspicion, then one clue is in the data centers’ aesthetics. Torre Girona is one of a tragically small band of data centers that are anything other than appalling eyesores. There are enchanting examples of this category: a former coal mine in Svalbard, a converted chapel in Leeds, and a supervillain-style bunker in the bedrock beneath Stockholm. But these are irreproducible at best, gimmicks at worst. To call the average data center a carbuncle would be unduly flattering; at least carbuncles have some color in them. A typical data center, however, is a vast and windowless gray box. The exterior of such a building says nothing about its locality and history, nothing about what services they seek to render humanity. Instead, most data centers look like blank statements of disinterested cheapness, embodiments of the attitude that might condemn most of humanity to the status of, as it is sometimes described, the “permanent underclass”. To make their point, the enemies of data centers need do little more than share pictures. “Is this what we want for our country?” they ask. 

Ironically, data centers enable the very capabilities that can be used to reimagine them. Every now and then, someone goes viral on X for posting a mockup of, say, a data center that looks like a castle; or for arguing that data centers, since they produce so much heat, “should obviously be built in the style of Georgian and Victorian glass houses, filled with citrus trees and other exotic plants”. Infused with Anglofuturist zeal, the Government recently announced the creation of a data center design contest. Data centers, argued Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, ought not to be “anonymous, gray buildings that our communities are asked to simply tolerate. Infrastructure should say something different. It should say your community matters, that you are part of the national story that you are helping to power into the future.”

Whether the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is the right partner for this prize is debatable. RIBA’s Stirling Prize generally rewards architecture that, in its placeless modern blandness, pleases architects rather than stirs the public. This new partnership, one suspects, is less likely to produce noble new cathedrals than a few larch-clad eco-warehouses. Yet the Government has little option but to try to get the public onside, for there is an international bidding war for data centers. Apart from generating tax revenue for their hosts, local data centers facilitate activity that requires a quick and ideally proximate connection between one computer and another. If you’re using AI to help maintain the National Grid, or you’re running a factory production line that uses robotics, or you’re about to go under the knife of a robot surgeon, then you’ll want a data center near you rather than in, say, Virginia. And if you dislike the idea of Britons’ health data being stored abroad, then the corollary of that view is that the data should be stored on British soil. Whether we are trying to achieve sovereignty or, more humbly, solvency, we need data centers.

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And we are behind. The US has three times as much data-center capacity as Britain, with much more planned. But the American public’s more organized opposition to data centers, with Erin Brockovich playing a prominent part, gives middle powers an opportunity to take up a larger share of the global AI economy. All parties, though, face a menacing competitor, for the migration into space has already begun. Elon Musk plans to send xAI data centers into orbit, thus circumventing — or rather, soaring far above — the physical and regulatory obstacles one finds on Earth. In this case, the immediate benefit to the general public is significantly lessened. Devon County Council stands little chance of collecting tax revenue from an xAI orbital cluster. 

This makes the task of improving data centers, and winning round a skeptical public, even more pressing. It is unfortunate for Britain, as for most of the West, that this challenge presents itself after several decades in which cheap nuclear energy has been neglected, Big Tech has alienated the public, and oikophobic architects and regulators have made crowd-pleasing civic design a modern rarity. 

And yet it is possible to at least remember civic infrastructure capable of provoking enthusiasm. Shipbuilding towns were proud of the vessels they built together: many years after the shipyards closed, local newspapers still wax nostalgic. Battersea Power Station, that brooding brick hulk, was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott as an art deco cathedral to industry. It was not universally popular at the time of its inception, but it has been preserved long after it was decommissioned. Even sewage infrastructure can be resplendent: Joseph Bazalgette’s Crossness Pumping Station is a remarkable feat of colorful neo-Gothicism. Other buildings of a similar age — the V&A, the Natural History Museum — use statue and ornament to trumpet their contents. Perhaps, given this history, there is a version of the future in which people are excited to welcome new infrastructure, even data centers, safe in the knowledge that it will benefit their town visually, financially, and even spiritually.

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The problem is that, as economies advance, much of life becomes further divorced from what we naturally find meaningful. Few in the West work together, with their hands, on products as tangible as a ship. Checking a data center’s air con system somehow lacks the romance of shipbuilding. And on the rare occasions that we build railway stations, or anything else, cheap materials and gloomy designs are almost universally preferred to characterful local alternatives. Data centers, in their lonely, empty ugliness, are a symptom of these trends rather than a particularly egregious example of them.

That makes the challenge even harder. Welcome though more attractive designs might be, it is not enough to plaster the planet with data centers that happen to be housed in ersatz chapels or plastic castles. Instead, the designers of genuinely publicly-spirited data centers, with hyperscalers and governments taking particular responsibility, must find some way of expressing, through architectural form, what these buildings could mean for humanity. In this respect, Battersea Power Station and the V&A are more inspiring templates than an Amazon fulfillment center.

The apparently trivial matter of data center aesthetics therefore cuts to the heart of what AI is really for. Often, what the opprobrium towards data centers really signals is public fear of impotence, uselessness, and exploitation of the commons. If AI is to transform the world, then the default outcome is not necessarily one that puts human dignity at its heart. Yet it is the role of aesthetics, even in the disembodied realm of AI, to remind us what to strive towards. And in a time of acceleration, disenchantment and disorientation, that role could scarcely be more important. 

I will soon arrive, with some relief, at the glorious destination of being completely uninteresting to men. It’s called old age.

I know about misogyny, then – all women do. I know how it summons wreckage in women’s lives. I am poorer because I am a woman, I have lower status because I am a woman, and I am less confident because I am a woman. Although I am brave in print, in life I squeak like Minnie Mouse, and I wish I didn’t. I have had sexual experiences I did not want because I am a woman: and still, I know I’m lucky. I am a rich, white, western woman. Some people call it privilege. I call it the thick end of the wedge.

But I did not know how extensive – how absolute – the web of misogyny is until I read Invisible Woman: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. I read it while shouting at my husband. Perez is a sensible, second-wave Feminist – not a fourth-wave imbecile who thinks that prostitution is a valuable human right to be defended by those noble activists previously known as pimps. She campaigned for a statue of Millicent Fawcett to be placed in Parliament Square and a picture of Jane Austen (a sanitised portrait in which Jane looks pretty, because you can’t have everything) to be placed on a bank note.

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I read the book in a rage. What is sensed, and lived, by women in a patchwork across class and continent is presented, in Criado Perez’s plain, detailed and almost overwhelming prose, as a self-perpetuating and all-consuming system of oppression and denial, in which women are an appendage to men, who have designed the world entirely for their own comfort and safety. There is no anger in Criado Perez’s pages – she is too busy with evidence for that – just as there is, as far as I can tell, no malice in this vast system of misogyny. It was all done thoughtlessly, like a man running over a child in the dark. The truth is, they just didn’t see us.

The book opens with Simone de Beauvoir’s words: “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” Criado Perez then spends three hundred pages proving de Beauvoir right, in chapters on environment, workplace, design, health, and politics.

Almost everything is designed for men. Cities are designed for men. Transport infrastructure is designed for men: when, for instance, did a wise woman last take a baby on the London Underground, which is clearly, during rush hour, unsafe, and yet usually a woman’s work? Why is money tossed at road-building, which favours “the unencumbered man”, not provision of public transport, which more women use on their longer, more potted trails through life? Even parks are designed for men, for unless care is taken to design them for women’s safety, fewer women – and girls – will use them, and their health will suffer.

One fascinating anecdote tells how, when the toilets of a theatre were made gender neutral, it only increased men’s space, for they used the cubicles in both, while women were, due to their bodies, denied the urinals. Women spend 97 billion hours a year, she writes, looking for a safe place to relieve themselves, and this is likewise detrimental to health. Invisible Women is full of such maddening insights.

The generalisations are accurate – women earn less, have less, care more for children and the elderly (which is spun, deceitfully, as “choice”) and slip into invisibility as the system devalues them. The would-be powerful woman – Hillary Clinton, for instance – is struck down for her presumption, and replaced with a dangerous imbecile. But it is the detail that compels. For instance, in Britain, the Pregnant Workers Directive does not apply to politicians; there is, Criado Perez writes, “no provision for them [female politicians] to vote without turning up in person”. For politicians! In July 2018 the Conservative MP Brandon Lewis was paired with the pregnant, and absent, Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson. But he forgot, and voted anyway, and he got away with it. Apple, in 2017, declared that its US HQ was “the best office building in the world”. It had a spa and a dentist. It did not have a creche.

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I would describe the condition of women in the workplace as a shit storm. People who believe they are meritocrats are the least likely to be meritocrats. Universities and tech companies who boast of being ‘woke’ are among the worst employers. Bias against women is everywhere – see the archetypes – and without care and research, it thrives. Blind auditions for orchestras raised female representation by 45%. In academia, double-blind reviews (where the author and reviewer are anonymous) mean that female authored papers are more likely to be accepted, and better rated. For women to thrive as men do, their gender must, quite literally, be masked.

This bias leaks into the schoolroom – where girls learn that scientists and geniuses are male; misogyny is not inbuilt, but learned. Algorithms, invented by men, favour men. We corrupt children, and we corrupt computers, and, in turn, they corrupt us.

Every victory contains a defeat. Female soldiers are injured off the battlefield because they are forced to march in step with men. Packs that took breasts into account were not invented until 2011, 35 years after women were admitted to US military academies. Female coastguards in the UK cannot easily use the toilet on duty – see the 97 billion hours above – because the clothes are not designed for them. In 1997, a female police officer died in the UK because she removed her body armour to operate a hydraulic ram, which she could not use while wearing body armour that did not fit her because it was designed for a man.

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There is too much death in this book – some caused by sexual assault, because women’s spaces are unsafe or non-existent, and some caused by negligence, because women’s bodies are forgotten. There is so little investment in pelvic floor health, for instance – men decide what is suitable for research, and they forgot the female pelvic floor – that a current scandal details how women with prolapsed vaginas had mesh inserted as a cure. Many were left with chronic pain. At least one, in Scotland, has died. Women seeking help for physical problems are dismissed as fantasists, or trouble-makers. Viagra is plentiful. So is death in childbirth.

It’s comic sometimes, if you care to laugh at darkness. The voice command software in a Ford Focus did not respond to the female driver, but it did respond to her husband in the passenger seat – because it was programmed to hear a deeper voice. Criado Perez lost me only once, when she noted that the average smartphone is too small to fit easily into a woman’s hand. Not important, I thought, but then she detailed a riot in which a female researcher could not take a photograph with one hand, while a male one could. It’s a tiny thing, but it brought disadvantage, glibly.

This is a brilliant book, then, to thump the gropers and the deniers with – the people who point out masculine suffering, which is real, to detract from female suffering, which is likewise real. Everyone should read it.

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