buzzcut | Architecture and fun

Fun House
- Why is a big plastic chair fun? This chair offers all of the usual affordances of any chair. You can sit in it, for instance. What makes this particular plastic chair fun, where a plastic patio chair is not, is the shape of the object. Appropriating the form of a luxurious leather arm chair, the hard plastic contradicts the usual expectation of comfort. Likewise, the material—cast in red plastic—makes the chair look like a giant toy and, once again, denies the high culture formal qualities this sort of furniture usually denotes. A chair that is not a chair (instead a toy),a sophisticated arm chair that is not sophisticated, and toy that that is not a toy (it’s a chair!).
  
  That’s one fun chair.
  
  04/29/13
- Fun musical house.
  
  Is it art or just plain fun? In concept, this seems like a fun thing to do—turn your house into an environmentally responsive machine. We think of architecture as stable, oddly permanent. It frustrates us when it leaks and creaks, crumbles and flakes.
  
  A “Singing House” takes that temporal aspect of architecture and makes it visible (well, audible). Somehow this simultaneously allows us to see the stability of architecture as something fluid and brings to life the inanimate of the architectural ideal.
  
  The Singing House is a member of the class of RVs—homes that are not homes.
  
  Of course, in practice, this is an exercise in beauty. So, maybe, if this was your house, what starts in novelty as something playful, ends in an experience of the world, an electric connection with nature. Art.
  
  03/29/13
- The Useless Machine
  
  Here’s another fun object. The useless machine from : The Frivolous Engineering Company. Flip the switch and a small robotic finger pops out of the box to turn it of. (Visit the site to see the machine in action)
  
  A machine whose purpose is to have no purpose.
  
  And so, a reference fun object.
  02/21/13
- What makes a fun object?
  
  Here’s an example of the ironic approach—an electronic candle powered by a real candle.
  
  In this case, the irony is such that the object is a kind of intriguing joke. The candle that is not a candle that needs a candle to run. It’s a pure form of fun object, a thing that is not the thing that is claims to be.
  
  Nudge nudge, wink wink.
  
  12/21/12
- Magic only works when we know that there is some trick, something more than meets the eye, at work.
  
  Impossible bottles compress the wonder of magic into a single object—something impossible but obviously possible. It’s a trick to be sure, but the method is not obvious, and the fun of the object is experienced in its contradiction of common sense and form. “How do you get those things in the bottle?”
  
  10/30/12
- A “Spite house” is a structure built to somehow thwart or otherwise spite some other development plans. The Richardson Spite House, which once stood in New York City on Lexington between 82nd and 83rd , was only 5 feet deep with bays jutting to 7 feet. It was said that Richardson built the home to spite a neighbor who refused the price on the thin strip of land. But when the wealthy Richardson moved into one of the narrow homes he had constructed, it seems more than spite was in play.
  
  While the Richardson Spite House was eventually razed, there are plenty of examples of standing spite structures that continue to house residents.
  
  http://twistedsifter.com/2011/10/homes-built-out-of-spite/
  
  Why? It might be spite that initiates the construction. But the unconventional structures provide fun spaces for living.
  
  09/17/12
- More upside down homes!
  
  This one, very much to the point, was built as an eye-catcher to promote a Florida real estate development.
  
  06/21/12
- A couple of weeks ago I gave a short presentation at the Environmental Design Research Association annual conference titled, “The Authentic Fake.” My goals was to challenge some of the authority of the authentic by suggesting a humanistic and liberating facility in the genuine fake—like a Taco Bell in Mexico.
  
  Last week I was in Boston wandering around the King’s Chapel and Burying Ground. Among these very old, quite distinctive and surely authentic gravestone markets, I couldn’t help but think I had stumbled across a set for a new Tim Burton movie, or perhaps Disney had opened a new Haunted Mansion attraction in Beantown.
  
  Sometimes the most authentic things in the world just seem fake.
  
  And that’s fun!
  
  06/19/12
- Another upside down house? Sure. This one is apparently from Szymbark Poland.
  
  05/26/12
- A friend sent this link off to me and asked, “Is this a fun house?”
  
  Yes, yes it is. Material playfulness, a wall that is not a wall, a window that is not a window. Fun.
  
  05/22/12
No Fun at All

by David • June 6, 2011 • 0 Comments

This spring I had a chance to sit down with Ian Bogost and talk about Cow Clicker. Like a lot of people, I find Cow Clicker fascinating. Like a lot of people, I don’t think Cow Clicker is fun, at least in any ordinary sense. Perhaps unlike a lot of people, I think that...
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The Missing Middle: Looking for Fun at GDC

by David • March 9, 2011 • 0 Comments

Here’s what I learned at the 2011 Game Developers Conference: The most interesting dialog about games has moved from a sort of constrained, technical conversation around the ins and outs of making games that people want to buy and play to a messy free-for-all of blinding insight, hard-won experience and philosophical examination. Gaming discourse...
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The Simple Pleasures of Tresspassing

by David • January 21, 2011 • 0 Comments

The ever-insightful Gus Mastrapa points to one of the central pleasures in videogames in a recent colum: Video Games Make Trespassers Out Of Us All We don’t realize it, but our everyday lives are full of limitations. Our daily rituals take place in a narrow channel walled by invisible barriers. When you take a...
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Minecraft Urbanism and Taking the Fun Out of Place

by David • December 17, 2010 • 1 Comment

Minecraft has become a recent obsession. A sort of SimCity meets Lego meets Dungeons and Dragons, the emphasis is on building and exploration. And all the while you click away at the endless landscape of blocks, you have a feeling that the game is more important than just your latest game habit. This video...
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Night of the Living Downtown

by David • October 25, 2010 • 0 Comments

City planners and urban boosters find the question of how to create a vibrant and attractive downtown an ongoing puzzle. Sports and shopping and the occasional festival fill out a fairly standard set of tools used to try focus attention in the regional middle. Leave it to a bunch of zombies to create a...
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Fun or Funny?

by David • October 18, 2010 • 0 Comments

Fun and funny. What’s the difference, how can you tell and why does it matter? The connection seems to lie right below the surface, but remains as quick as a fish and twice as slippery when you try to grab it. In one of those unscripted moments in life where things comes together in...
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Fun: Abridged

by David • October 15, 2010 • 0 Comments

Prior to my TEDx Boulder talk on “What makes a place fun?” CU Boulder profession, and scholar of the concept of “funny” asked me for a a quick answer to the question I posed in my talk title. Here’s the answer in under a minute on Peter’s site.
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(Board) Games and Architecture

by David • October 4, 2010 • 0 Comments

.There is an ongoing interest in the idea of games and architecture. Usually this means videogames. And usually this means how buildings are designed in games. When you want to think more about the concept of games and the concept of architecture, I think it helps to look at board games. I have taught...
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What makes a place fun?

by David • September 23, 2010 • 0 Comments

Last month I have the privileged to speak before an audience of 1,400 people at TEDx Boulder. My topic was, “What makes a place fun?” Whether or not I answered that question, you can decide for yourself: This question of fun is central to my dissertation research which, among other things, proposes to offer...
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Blogging Fun

by David • August 8, 2010 • 0 Comments

After wrapping up a fascinating time at TEDx Boulder, I am thinking it might be time to re-yoke myself to the blogging plow. From those that saw my little speech on “What makes a place fun?” you know that I find the nature of fun in this paradox betweens something that simultaneously is and...
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Computing Comes to the Surface

by David • April 15, 2010 • 0 Comments

The most interesting technology surprises. The iPad surprised me. Hold it in your hands and it is just a big iPod. Neat, flashy. A wonderful gizmo. But just that, a gizmo. The surprising thing happens when you lie the device flat on a table. As a horizontal computing surface, and one that integrates input...
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GDC Day 3: Seriously, they Have Games Here

by David • March 12, 2010 • 0 Comments

If you go to swimming pool convention, do you go swimming? My guess is that you just stand around with a bunch of balding men with deep tans and talk about filters. But I really don’t know. At GDC, the whole idea has been to talk about games. This is the place that people...
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About buzzcut

buzzcut cares about videogames and architecture An odd mix, at least if you trained on classic notions of aesthetics. But, I digress, and you are here for the short version, right?

The question that drives this site, and my research is this: What makes a place fun?

buzzcut looks into games as environments (or environments as games).

Old buzzcut posts are archived at http://www.buzzcut.com/archive

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