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Architects Just Wanna Have Fun

Dec
19

I can only imagine what kind of wild parties star architects throw. At least, they give the impression of having a really good time with their amusing structures designed to mask their obvious playfulness with somber theorizing and mannered justifications.

Still, I figure the vast rank and file of environmental designers dream about weird, wild and kooky structures. They just don't get as many obvious chances to express them.
This is the conclusion I come to when thinking about things like the Google SketchUp Gingerbread House Design Competition. On first glance, this is just a bit of seasonal good cheer and some sly marketing fun put on by Google to get its SketchUp community to try some new things. Likewise, this little competition with no prizes touches the exact point I want to make, namely that inside every architect is a child that wants to play with design and make something unabashedly fun.

And Google is not alone in mashing up the architectural competition with holiday food models. Offbeathomes.com (a very eclectic and cool architectural blog I recently stumbled across), has its own portfolio of notable gingerbread homes and points to Bake for a Change , eco-friendly gingerbread house builds .

Now if we could only get the housing industry to put so much creative effort and joy into the production of actual fun domiciles!


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Unusual Buildings

Dec
09

Call them follies, flights of fancy or simply playful disruptions of more staid architectural design. Whatever the label, people continue to build idosynchratic structures that manage to express imagination, whimsy and fun above all else.

The Village of Joy blog rounds up lists of all kinds of wonderment, from crazy ads to optical illusions. Their collection of architectural oddities  ranges all over the topical and geographical map. And while it lacks any clear criteria for lists such as "The 10 Strangest Buildings in the World ", the visual surveys do manage to crack a smile and raise the question–what is it about these buildings that make them attractive, that make them seem like fun?
Also, visit sister site Unusual-architecture.com for photo blogging of the same crazy collection of buildings.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Mid-Century Modern Gingerbread House

Dec
03

Hmm. Seems like this would be an obvious choice. Making gingerbread houses on modernism lines certainly provides a simple method for organizing regular graham cracker elements into recognizable shapes. But credit this creator for assembling the Eames Case study house as a seasonal, eatable decoration !

As it turns out, it works out pretty well in chocolate too.
And the idea of marrying the clean lines of crackers to modern designs has at least a few followers 

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Haunted Virtual Mansion

Nov
30

What do you get when you mash up the American historicist fantasy of the home with the haunted house house, destination leisure, videogames and an insatiable taste for post-modern irony?

This:

This video provides a walkthrough of a Counter-Strike mod simulating the famous recreation in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom of the equally famous original facsimile haunted house in California’s Disneyland (The Disney World version is set in Liberty Square rather than New Orleans and oddly features a Tudor manor facade with ornament pulled directly from the chess board).
What to make of this? Well a few points come to mind and deserve some sort of integrated theory at some point:
  • The haunted house is a popular form of American myth
  • There is a specific form of haunted house that is distinctly American, although tightly tied to the Gothic revival in architecture of the early 1800 and conindicing with the rise of Gothic horror literature (such as Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818).
  • The original Haunted Mansion shows the link to architecture is more tenuous than that to literature (since the Disneyland building looks like an antebellum mansion with a strong Greek revival portico and nothing of the Gothic).
  • However, the Disney castmembers who acts as guides in the ride model their behavior after dour Victorian maids and butlers.
  • Part of the fun of a Disney park is that it obviously plays with being real, while remaining childish and intentionally not real.
  • Which leads to a twin facincation with its reality/unreality that transfer through to a virtual recreation inside a game engine.
  • The video viewers facincation is, in part, a marveling at the level of detail that went into the recreation of the Mansion as a 3D model. An equal part of the attraction is reliving the ride in simulated form, recognizing detail that makes the artificial recreation feel more real.
  • The unifying principle of the Disney Haunted Mansions and Mansion simulations relates directly to their visibility–how much they look like amusing, stsylized version of places that only ever existed in imagination and literature.
Finally, I should point out, there are many more of these ride recreations. Ride simulation remains a healthy culture!
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Get Small — Landscape, Scale and Fun

Nov
17

What makes a place fun? 

Scale seems to have something to do with it.

As any SimCity player can tell you, part of what makes that game fun is playing a powerful being that can dink with a giant city. It's fun to feel big, or at least, it's fun to look at tiny things.

London-based slinkachu  creates tiny urban tableaux from miniature figures placed in satirical and surprising settings. You might find police investigating a drowning victim in a puddle, or thrill-seekers riding a real snail. Pictures of the tiny people close up and then from a pedestrian point of view makes clear the exaggerations in scale and through these contrasts the comedy works.

San Francisco-based artist Krista Peel has created a large number of doll house-inspired miniature art projects. Her 2009 calendar project, Public Park  provided a 52" x 30" HO scale park and invited fellow artists to create scenes to place in the park. The Candy Land-colored scenes combine miniature whimsy with a landscape that seems real enough that you find yourself wishing that it was.
What's the critical place of scale in fun? These projects suggest a few answers–surprising juxtaposition, childlike wonder at toy-sized objects, unexpected collisions of naive and serious content and, well, there's just something magical about tiny pretend people.

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