Fun House

I have seen these sorts of crazy cat contraptions in crazy cat peoples' homes before. What is particularly attractive about this particular approach is that it is, well, attractive.

I just wonder why they don't scale up the designs for people. Furniture cluttering the floor is so boring.

I've never quite understood the graphic designer ire about the font Comic Sans

Its jaunty, handwritten style, vaguely reminiscent of the hand lettering in comic books, seems like a perfect antidote to tightly controlled and frankly much better dressed fonts.

Yet, there is something distasteful about the font. And when a friend at work gave me this t-shirt, it all came clear.

Comic Sans is supposed to be fun. But like a dad putting a screaming toddler on a merry go ground with the encouragement, "This will be fun!", Comic Sans is all about grinning coercion. This is the Joker's own font because it is exactly not fun at all. It is a font smiling in bad faith, promising something it will never deliver.

In my construction of the fun concept as something that is both is and is not what it say it is, Comic Sans is all what it is not. It's not a font in any respectable way. It can't rub elbows with even the likes of Chicago or Courier. It's a pretender from the start. So, it has no where to go. Comic Sans only works as a not-a-good-font with no good-fontness to open up the playful ambiguity of fun.

Or, put much more elegantly by my awesome new t-short--forced fun.

When paranoia feels like a ride.

When you build a home underground, fearing Russian nuclear attack and you have the presence of mind to simulate the outside world. It's like Walt Disney meets Dr. Strangelove.

I talk a lot about the is/is not nature of fun. And this example almost seems to break that model. You ca imagine going mad, living in this home, staring at painted cows and dreaming about driving up a dirt road that dead-ends, cartoon-style, into a concrete wall.

Or maybe this is a perfect illustration of a fun house. It's fun to look at. It would be a blast to visit. But only if you could emerge from its Stepford perfection back into the scorching Nevada sun.

Richard Garriott is famous for a number of things--designing some key games in the history of the medium, including Ultima Online, and spending a good chunk of his fortune to shoot himself into space.

He also builds amazing and whimsical homes for himself. I have had the pleasure to tour his Austin resident. But now he has completed his new digs in New York City:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/29/4668516/secret-passages-vampire-hunting-kits-and-sputnik-a-tour-of-richard

http://www.jumbostay.com/

Pop up books are magical in the way they take the flat, rectilinear nature of the book and break the plane.

Paper engineering, as it is called, remains a surprising art that delights both children and adults because these kinds of books are fun.

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!).

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.

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. 

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.

Magic only works when we know that there is some trick, something more than meets the eye, at work.

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/

More upside down homes!

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.

A friend sent this link off to me and asked, "Is this a fun house?"