P.O.Box owners

Comment

Comment by Carla Cryptic on January 21, 2009 at 8:38am

I still can't find the PO Box pix but thought I'd share the home PO Box since we changed it somewhat from the plain white box. It's very warm now in a sort of metallic paint and Graham made the number sign to match our fence color and I painted the numbers themselves to match the postal box and the wrought iron on the porch.

Comment by Talking Bird on January 17, 2009 at 4:15pm

The deluxe doors of early 20th century mailboxes
Before the Minimalist movement, most manufactured items were heavily decorated. The cost of the decoration was negligible, since one design would be used for thousands or millions of copies. It was assumed that everyone would want decoration, which only the rich could afford before the time of mass production. But, beginning in the early 20th century, there was a lot of talk about clean lines, and less is more, and form follows function, and ornament and crime.
Those ideas slowly took over, via the Bauhaus, Brutalism, and other movements, and by perhaps 1950 could be considered mainstream. Sculptors created simple geometric solids with unadorned surfaces. Buildings, which now are just assemblies of mass-produced units, were increasingly designed without decoration, except for houses, where (at least in the US) the amount of mass-produced decoration attached to the outside of a house continued to be the same status symbol that the old hand-made, crime-breeding ornament had been.
Art has moved on, but mailboxes are still in the 1950's. Holders of minimalist mailboxes should realize the opportunity to create their own non-mass-produced decoration, just as inner city youth decorate the bare masses of concrete supporting the expressways that now intrude on their neighborhoods.

Comment by Ruud Janssen on January 17, 2009 at 12:09pm

Here it is, My P.O. Box, and also the Mail-Boxes where all ougoing mail goes in.

Comment by Bev Dittberner on January 17, 2009 at 8:47am

every year I get a P.O. Box bill and I keep thinking I will let my P.O. go and everytime I decide to hand in the keys I change my mind, because it's so cheap and it's located at eye level - how cool is that.

Comment by Ruud Janssen on January 17, 2009 at 7:28am

Will take a camera and will show how the Box in Breda looks like....

Comment by Carla Cryptic on January 17, 2009 at 7:26am

It's standard in some older post offices. The Berkeley main PO has some really cool WPA-era art which was restored some years ago. The really amazing one is in San Francisco at Rincon Annex. It's gorgeous!

Comment by Ruud Janssen on January 17, 2009 at 7:10am

Is this standard. For me it looks like a luxury home for mail-art!

Comment by Carla Cryptic on January 17, 2009 at 4:24am

Wow, I didn't know that! I live in Richmond but grew up in Berkeley and went to UC and then worked there till I took early retirement and Graham still works there. I decided to keep my po box there since everyone knows the number by now and I'd hate to have to change it after all these years.

Comment by Talking Bird on January 17, 2009 at 12:07am

Berkeley is right next to us. But they have home delivery. The Postal Service offered us the choice to have home delivery; but if we chose it they said they would close our little PO and deliver our mail from the Berkeley PO. So we voted against it.

Comment by Carla Cryptic on January 16, 2009 at 10:51pm

Aha! Your photo of the PO box is just like the one I have in Berkeley. It seems it is a certain era-specific style. One uses letters instead of numbers to open the box. :)

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