From the Hilarious to the Ludicrous: The Place of Humour in Architecture
We treat architecture altogether too seriously. Not only are basically no buildings being constructed that wink playfully at the viewer, but it’s also us, the users, who have a hard time looking at architecture with humour and irony.
In the year 2016, in the outskirts of the Dutch town of Amersfoort, a multi-functional building designed by the Attika Architekten studio was raised. At first glance, the construction seems to be rather ordinary: divided into multiple smaller segments, it’s comprised of two to four storeys and a glass-panelled ground floor, with dark brick facades crisscrossed by white, horizontal beams made of prefabricated concrete blocks. Upon a closer look, however, one can notice that these beams feature an unusual detail: reliefs depicting… emojis, i.e. face icons representing various emotions, known from online messaging applications. The architects themselves inform that the emojis serve as a modern tribute to the tradition of ornamenting the facades of Gothic churches or castles with the depictions of human figures or fantastical beasts, while also being a nod to contemporary culture. The emojis on the Amersfoort office building are subtle and unobtrusive; they don’t dominate the construction. Once you notice them, however, it’s difficult to suppress a smile, as these elements introduce to architecture an element of wit and surprise.
Similar concepts are difficult to come by among contemporarily implemented architectural solutions. Nowadays, architecture is treated incredibly seriously by creators and users alike. And amindst all this seriousness, there’s little space for teasing winks or whimsical details. Was their entire potential thoroughly exhausted by postmodernists? After all, postmodernism has been the only trend in the history of architecture to date in which humour and pastiche, jokes, grotesque, playing with form and the viewer constituted some of the fundamental premises. Admittedly, no binocular-shaped building (like the office building designed in 1991 in Los Angeles by Frank Gehry) has ever been raised in Poland, and neither does our country boast any construction whose roof would be held up by gigantic figures of dwarves from the tale of Snow White (like the design for the headquarters of the Disney production company in Burbank, authored by Michael Graves in 1990). We do, however, have a residential block in the shape of a castle, towers included.
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Castle-shaped block in Czyżyny, Kraków, photo: Joanna Urbaniec Polska Presse / East News
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The residential building raised for the employees of the University of Physical Education in Kraków was designed in the 1980s by a team led by Leszek Filar. Although the architects themselves claimed that the project was meant to express ‘the spirit of Polishness’ and celebrate Kraków’s heritage, nowadays it’s considered ridiculous and thus frequently visited and photographed by tourists. Kraków is also home to an extraordinary small-scale construction that gives a particularly unique shape to the postmodernist trend of combining various, sometimes surprising elements. It’s the headquarter of the Hean cosmetics production facility, designed in the 1980s by Dariusz Kozłowski. The brick construction paraphrases archetypal factory forms, except one of its pavilions is ornamented with gigantic pink lips placed on the facade.
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Poznań, residential-commercial development, Jeżyce, Poznańska-Jeżycka-Mylna-Kochanowskiego Streets, designed by Izabela Klimaszewska and Tadeusz Biedak, photo: Anna Cymer
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Designing the Renaissance Business Centre office building, located in the Wrocław Old Town, Dorota and Kazimierz Śródek set a humorous trap to capture the viewers. One can hardly suppress the feeling of astonishment upon realising that it’s the building’s windows that are brick-built while the walls are made of glass. It’s also difficult to overlook the witty aspect of the idea implemented by Izabela Klimaszewska and Tadeusz Biedak, the authors of an infill building inserted between tenement houses in Kochanowskiego Street in the Poznań district of Jeżyce. The architects consciously refused to honour the historic forms of the surrounding buildings, and so not only does the new construction cut into their structure with a diagonal wall, but it also differs in terms of materials, colour, and height, disrupting the layout of windows and the rhythm of facade divisions.
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Apartment block with pyramids, 14 Batalionów Chłopskich Street, Łódź, photo: Piotr Kamionka / Reporter / East News
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The liberty made possible by postmodernism, which shaped Polish architecture of the transformation period [1990s, trans.], brought about the implementation of numerous projects whose aesthetic value tends to be considered dubious. The line between the hilarious and the ludicrous is thin and shaky. Perhaps that’s why humorous forms are so difficult to come upon in architectural design? After all, it’s not always easy to pinpoint where a bold and unique idea ends and kitsch or tackiness begins. Moreover, such assessments can be modified as times change. For instance, two decades ago began the thermo-modernisation of Poland’s enormous residential blocks. Some were painted in somewhat bold patterns: in the Gdańsk district of Zaspa, the Kraków district of Prokocim, and the Łódź district of Retkinia, the blocks were adorned with setting suns, ships, airplanes, human figures, and large insects stretching across multiple storeys. The designs for these metamorphoses were criticised as childish and kitschy. And yet, a block in Łódź decorated with paintings of sun-drenched Egyptian pyramids is now one of the city’s most recognisable buildings and has attained an iconic status of sorts.
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Gorzów Wielkopolski, Town Square, photo: Anna Cymer
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A similar situation has taken place in Gorzów Wielkopolski. In the 1960s, the buildings around the Old Town Square that got destroyed during World War Two were replaced by blocks (such practices were commonplace in Poland at the time). In the 1990s, these blocks were further decorated with elements resembling historic tenement homes. One of the corner buildings was even endowed with crenellations inspired by… mediaeval castles. The local authorities have recently announced a plan to remove these postmodernist costumes from the houses around the Town Square and to restore their modernist forms. This has led to a lively discussion about which of these aesthetic solutions is better. It turns out that the borderline kitschy paintings of tenement houses are well-liked by the inhabitants, considered friendlier, more positive and cheerful than the block’s previous aesthetic design. Similarly, buildings such as upside-down houses in Szymbark and Zakopane, or the Crooked House in Sopot, can hardly be considered anything else than architectural jokes. Almost unanimously deemed an expression of bad taste and kitsch, they’re simultaneously well-loved landmarks that regularly attract crowds of tourists.
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‘The HOP’ office building, Warsaw, photo: Anna Cymer
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Utilising the postmodernist tendency to play around with mixed styles, pastiche, formal exaggeration, and jokes can also assume less controversial forms, such as the new incarnation of the 1990s office building in Chmielna Street in Warsaw. Here, the investor didn’t opt for a demolishing of the outdated construction (which is a commonplace practice); what’s more, he decided to visually bring out the transformation-era origin of the building. The designer Anna Łoskiewicz from Łoskiewicz Studio developed an idea for the structure’s new form, whose character would from now on be defined by colours, contrasts, surprising combinations, and visual play as if taken straight from the aesthetics of pop-art. Contemporary postmodernism also informed the efforts of the designers working on the metamorphosis of Włókiennicza Street in Łódź. After undergoing revitalisation following many years of neglect, the urban space was meant to be transformed through architecture. The tenement homes in Włókiennicza Street were modernised, and some of them were endowed with new, surprising aesthetic forms. For instance, one of the facades was decorated with geometrical figures of caryatides, another one was adorned with graphic after-images of architectural details, while yet another one was composed as if from two facades, one simple, one ornate.
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‘Warsaw’s Smile’ – a map of changes in the city centre, photo: City Hall of Warsaw
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In the year 2010, the CENTRALA project group together with Sebastian Bałut presented an urban planning concept named ‘Warsaw’s Smile’. Based on research, workshops, and organised walks, they found and marked on the map of the capital a downtown route along Mokotowska, Bracka, and Zgody Streets, whose trajectory forms a shape resembling the eponymous smile. In 2019, the city officials utilised the unambiguously cheery and optimistic association by giving the name ‘Warsaw’s Smile’ to the concept of modernising this part of downtown. The area encompassed by the project was to be made greener and more pedestrian-friendly. But although this vision is slowly being implemented, the smile component is no longer brought up in this context.
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Playground inspired by ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Frygijska Street, Warsaw, photo: Adam Burakowski / Reporter / East News
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What may, however, bring smiles to the users’ faces is a playground in the Warsaw district of Bielany put into use in 2023. While recreational spaces for the youngest city-dwellers tend to be similar to each other, here an original idea was implemented: all the facilities and street furniture have been given forms inspired by Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Designers from LS-Project, the studio behind the playground design, were inspired by the cinematic vision of the famous director in creating a unique space between the blocks of the Wrzeciono estate that’s attractive for children and parents alike.
There’s a widespread belief that Poles rarely smile. Whether due to our gloomy character or the deficit of sunlight, we, too, assess ourselves rather negatively. Perhaps the incorporation of humorous elements into the spaces we utilise daily could work to increase the number of smiles on Polish faces? And perhaps it’s worth taking inspiration from the accomplishments of our ancestors? As it turns out, architects employed such solutions even in the distant past. A popular element in Gothic architecture, for instance, were stalls, i.e. wooden, richly ornamented seats placed in the chancel for senior monks, priests, and service attendees. Numerous old cathedrals still feature stalls whose authors clearly had a sense of humour. For instance, in the Saint-Tugdual de Tréguier cathedral in Brittany, France, the misericords depict men bending over in vulgar poses with no trousers on; humorous scenes were also sculpted in the stalls in Bristol, the United Kingdom and in Nördlingen, Germany.
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Seating, Saint-Tugdual de Tréguier, Brittany, France, photo: SiGarb / CC BY-SA 3.0
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An acclaimed painter and architect who could probably earn the title of an architectural prankster was Giulio Romano, an artist working in the first half of the 16th century. If he created his works today, he would surely be labeled a postmodernist. Romano liked to depart from the established architectural standards: he designed diagonal cornices, fake supports that are actually paintings, and he inserted triangular windows into semi-circularly closed alcoves. As one can witness in Paisley Abbey in Scotland, Gothic architecture, too, easily lends itself to combinations with contemporary jokes. The monastery, established in the 12th century, was rebuilt, destroyed, and built anew many times over; although a part of the mediaeval walls was preserved to this day, these walls were nevertheless reconstructed, bit by bit, over different periods. And so, in the 1990s, new gargoyles appeared in the facades of the church’s naves.
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Gargoyle of Paisley Abbey, Scotland, photo: User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
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Sculptures depicting various figures placed on the cornices were a standard element of mediaeval churches, and a decision was made to reconstruct these features of the Paisley Abbey during the renovation works. However, the author of these ornaments decided to introduce a contemporary element among the mediaeval forms: one of the gargoyles has the shape of a xenomorph, an ‘alien’ taken straight from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. And it’s this very gargoyle that restores the abbey’s former fame, contributing to an increase in the number of tourists.
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Upside-down house in Szymbark, Kashubia, photo: Dawid Lasociński / Forum
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While architecture as such is an object of occasional jokes, architectural designs rarely include humorous elements. Perhaps it’s a bit of a shame? As long as the sense of proportion is retained and buildings aren’t turned into collections of funny curiosities, maybe it’d be nice to crack an occasional smile at the sight of an unusual detail, colour, or spatial solution. And maybe we ourselves could sometimes take a more relaxed and less stern attitude to assessing buildings, without expecting every one of them to represent only toned-down elegance, solemnity, and austerity of form. Let’s appreciate the architecture that makes us smile.
Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny