A 'Fun'tastic New Blog: Anammanzo: 'the Place of Dreams'

I was recently asked, as part of my course, to write an essay about a subject that interests me architecturally. For a long time now, I have known what I'm interested in, however expressing this in an academic way and finding some research written on it seems to be near impossible. My key search words have been 'fun and architecture, architecture and humor, the use of irony in architecture, playful architecture.' What may have been better to Google was perhaps 'fun : the taboo of architecture', as I have found, through countless tutorials, as it does certainly seem to have a taboo around it. It seems that today, particularly following the recession, architects feel like they are not allowed to be seen having fun while working, and that having fun while working in some way decreases the validity of your work, as you are seen to be 'not taking the task at hand seriously.' In addition to this, it seems that the same is true when actually proposing a project with fun connotations - in making the scheme playful/fun, your work only seems to be fit for use by children. Why is this?

A a subject, this has bugged me for a while. I thought I was the only one, until stumbling randomly on  anammanzo's blog last week. Ana's blog entitled 'the place of dreams' draws on the many thoughts we as architects have when designing projects, and notably the idea of fun in architecture. In her two essays 'fun architecture' and 'the fun theory' Ana addresses this taboo of fun and explains what I have been trying to explain for years to countless people when they so casually ask me ' what type of architecture are you in to?'. 'Fun architecture' is not the 'high tech/environmetal' answer they were expecting. Ana gives some good suggestions as to books to read on the subject too, (many of which have been sat on my Amazon wishlist for a while now!) bashing that intellectual cliche that fun architecture has no solid intellectual grounding. I for one will continue to follow Ana - I salute you Ana for putting into words what I couldn't.

fun architecture http://anammanzo.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/fun-architecture/

the fun theory....challanging human behavior
http://anammanzo.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/the-fun-theory-changing-human-behavior/