Matt Blaze
With a few exceptions (towers built-in to switching offices in densely populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this communications infrastructure *beautiful*. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.
But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. I wonder if we'll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, typically regarded as a visual blight, that way decades after they're gone.
Matt Blaze
The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. The concrete brutalist design appears not to have been used anywhere else; it seems to have been site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.
Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The horn antennas are disconnected relics.
Matt Blaze
By the 1980's, the terrestrial microwave network was overtaken by changing engineering and network economics. Microwave links, while relatively inexpensive to provision, simply could not compete with fiber optic cables for the growing bandwidth requirements of modern telecommunications. By the turn of the century, most of the towers were sold off and re-purposed for cellular or land mobile radio.
Often the classic horn antennas were abandoned in place, too big and heavy to remove safely.
Matt Blaze
For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T "Long Lines" long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 "horn" antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.
Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, a unique design.
Matt Blaze
Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).
The tower's shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.
The wide angle and landscape orientation give it context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).
Matt Blaze
AT&T Long Lines Oak Hill Tower, San Jose, CA, 2021.
Deposit 25 cents for three minutes of pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51261791084/
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