One element common to many Brazilians was recreating the 1970s setting of the film “The Secret Agent.” — nominated by Brazil to compete for the 2026 Oscar — and has become one of the symbols of the production. This is the public telephone, the public telephone, which has occupied the streets of the country for decades.
The image of Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura) using a telephone booth became a representation of the film worldwide and is today a trademark of the production.
This iconic egg-shaped phone booth, which had more than 50,000 units spread across the country, was designed by an architect born in China but who lived most of her life in Brazil: Chu Ming Silveira.
His project was so successful that other countries also decided to adopt it.
In an interview with the BBC World Service’s Witness History podcast, Alan Chu, Chu Ming’s son, shared his memories of his mother and her heritage, which has become a symbol of Brazil.
“I remember being proud of her, because she had designed something that was everywhere in the streets, like the telephone boxes in London, which became a symbol of the country, the same thing happened in Brazil with public telephones,” says Alan, an architect and living in Brasilia.
“And it’s very interesting because normally we import these kinds of things, ideas, designs. But the public telephone is a national creation, it’s a Brazilian invention. It’s the symbol of our creativity and our design.”
From China to Brazil
Chu Ming Silveira was born into a wealthy family in the city of Shanghai, China in 1941. His grandfather was a minister to the last Chinese emperor, Puyi.
“They were considered a noble family and had Western customs, like playing tennis and driving cars,” says Alan. His father served in the army during the Chinese Civil War, but after the Communist victory in 1949, Chu, then 7, and the rest of the family were forced to leave the country.
The family initially wanted to move to the United States, but Alan says his grandfather was fascinated by the idea of having a farm in Brazil.
“I heard that my grandparents had heard about the Amazon and were interested. And there was also the question of distance, they wanted to live somewhere far away. But I think it was more because of the Amazon that they came.”
After three months of traveling by boat, the family arrives in Rio de Janeiro. They soon moved to São Paulo, where they joined a growing Chinese and Japanese community in the Pinheiros neighborhood.
Chu studied architecture at university and quickly found a job with the Brazilian telephone company.
The origin of Orelhão
It was while Chu was working at the telephone company, in 1971, that she created a project that would change communications in Brazil forever.
Alan remembers that at that time there were no public telephones in Brazil. “They were in pharmacies or gas stations and there was no booth to protect the phone.”
Before Chu appeared, few Brazilian families could afford a telephone.
Previous attempts to build public telephones had caused enormous problems. Large cabins were vandalized, they were expensive to make and took up a lot of space.
So Chu’s job was to find a solution that was cheap, resistant to damage and visually pleasing. And that’s how Orelhão was born.
“We had one at our house. It was the prototype, the first one. It was white and it was in our garden,” remembers Alan.
When launched, the cabin had other names such as Chu I and Tulipa. But it was thanks to Orelhão that the telephone became known to the public.
It was light and visually beautiful, offered shelter from the Brazilian heat and, most importantly: it was shaped like an egg.
“It was something innovative in that sense, because it was a national project. It was designed for our country, for our climate,” explains Alan.
The format was chosen because of the acoustic quality. The design idea was that noise entering the cabin would be reflected to a point outside of it.
This protected people from noise and allowed a call to be made without too much noise.
The telephone box was a great success and more than 50,000 examples were built in the main cities of Brazil.
It was so successful that adaptations of the project have been installed in countries around the world, including Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Angola, Mozambique and even China.
For Alan, the fact that it was something unusual caught people’s attention.
“I think there’s a humorous component to the subject matter. It’s creative, different.”
Acknowledgement
Shortly after, Chun left the telephone company and went to work in real estate.
But it was only after his death in 1997 that his work began to be recognized.
And a lot of that is due to Chu’s husband, Clóvis, who launched a website under her name.
“We realized that it would be important, at the beginning of this information revolution, to organize all of this so that it would be distributed in the right way, by organizing the documents, the photographs and the information,” explains Alan.
In 2017, thanks to Clóvis’ work promoting Chu’s design, Google honored him by creating a doodle.
Alan says he felt honored to see his mother’s drawing on the search engine’s home page. Today, public telephones are no longer used in Brazil, due to the emergence of cell phones. But they remain a symbol of Brazilian creativity and innovation.
“It was very common for us, for my generation, a natural object in the city because there were no cell phones. We used it a lot. It’s part of our memory.”
In the history of Brazilian design, Chu Ming has its place because the telephone booth was something very unique and important.
Additionally, the fact that it was a woman leading this project, at a time when there were few female architects, is also historically relevant.
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