The tower with a second life
An ordinary-looking tower at Telefonplan became a canvas people could colour by phone.
Telefonplan in September 2005, before Colour by Numbers first opened. The tower appears at the left of the frame.
Photo: Jonas Bergsten / Wikimedia Commons; lens correction by Holger Ellgaard. · 2005-09-02 · Public domain · Source version includes lens correction by Holger Ellgaard. Resized and recompressed by Untypical. Displayed crops may vary.Before the colours
Look at the narrow tower on the left. A vertical line of small windows rises above the lower buildings, with projecting platforms near the top. In this photograph from September 2005, it reads as a piece of telecommunications infrastructure. The surprise belongs to what happened next.
Colour by Numbers first opened at Telefonplan in 2006. Created by Milo Galdi Lavén, Loove Broms and Erik Krikortz, the installation gave people a way to choose the tower’s illuminated colours using a mobile phone. A permanent version followed in January 2011.
A small decision, visible at city scale
The project uses the top ten floors of the 20-floor tower. Its website describes an app through which participants select floors and mix red, green and blue light. Each person has up to five minutes; their chosen combination remains until someone changes it. The lights are scheduled to activate at dusk.
None of that colour is visible in this earlier image. Instead, the photograph shows the structure that would become a shared canvas. The little windows are the link between those two lives: a repeated architectural detail later used to make individual choices visible across the skyline. We have checked the project’s description, but have not tested the app or the lights live.
Sources & further reading
Sources reviewed for this edition. Photography dates are shown separately.
