We all know architecture is a deathly serious business—but sometimes, that severity weighs so heavily that it becomes oppressive, restricting debate to an academic mean and setting a glacial pace of cultural influence. When that happens, the key to liberating architectural discourse might just arrive in a coat made of kittens, painted in Lisa Frank fluorescence.

That’s the strategy proposed by Joanna Grant in her MArch thesis at Princeton, ‘Overly Attached Cute’ (OAC), presented this past spring. The project is a web-based paper doll set of sorts, where classic building types, rendered in colorful cutesie cartoonery, quickly begin to rot, and players must adorn their buildings with all manners of objects to cover up the mess. These include actual architectural accessories, as well as random kitsch. Stuff you might find in a disorganized plastic toy chest. There’s no end to the play, just more stuff to click, drag, and attach to your rapidly decaying building.It’s all about using superficial cuteness to provoke longer-term attachments to architecture, and quicken its cultural influence

In her thesis text, Grant links the utility of cuteness in architecture to the elevated cuteness concept of ‘kawaii’: “Perhaps cuteness can act as a Trojan horse to talk about impolite matters, exactly in the same way that it responds to the strict cultural codes of Asia.” The key “impolite” matter in OAC is formalism, which Grant hopes her thesis can help safeguard by smothering it in HVACs, porthole windows or even a dinosaur. It’s all about using superficial cuteness to provoke longer-term attachments to architecture, and quicken its cultural influence: “The act of covering an image of a building may deface the architect’s intention, but if the affect is associating brutalism with a mental picture of a box full of kittens, the positive association could be heroic.”

In addition to its existence as a browser game, OAC is also Grant’s nonprofit architectural preservation organization, “dedicated to the improvement of underutilized and under adored architecture.” I asked Grant over email about how she developed OAC's structure, and what will become of the project post-thesis.

Why did you want to focus your architecture thesis on cuteness?

Cuteness is an aesthetic category that has not yet been fully explored in architecture, despite its proliferation in so many other aspects of lifestyle. As kitsch and pop have acted as the means through which high art speaks to commercialism, cuteness could be a method through which architecture speaks to a broader audience.if it’s adorable and you love it, you can’t demolish it or throw it away.

Having spent some time in downtown Los Angeles, I have developed a fascination with the ersatz culture of Japanese toys. I like the idea of collecting things that are utterly useless but that you just love. I recently acquired a set of sushi erasers, which are totally Postmodern: a symbol without any connection to function. Or in the words of Michael Meredith, “semiotics without meaning.”

How did you develop the “cuteness ruleset”?

Cuteness has been well studied in the soft sciences, attributing the face and body proportions of babies and young animals to the caretaker affect. Research has proven that our preference for cuteness stems from an evolutionary adaptation of neoteny, or the retention of juvenile characteristics in an adult. Konrad Lorenz’s research documents a correlation between infant facial proportions and the caretaker effect, referred to as the baby schema, which has the evolutionary function of ensuring survival.

The buildings featured in the game reference Michael Graves' Portland Building, Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, and Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower—why choose these three buildings in particular? What architectural styles in general do you feel are endangered and worthy subjects of preservation?

All of the buildings are either subject to demolition or in the process of demolition or renovation. Demonstrating the potential for cuteness in a broad range of architectural styles was important for the project—one could definitely say that there’s a historical precedence for it’d be cool if Uncle Rem would play it and send me a reaction video and a screen shot of what he made.a kind of cuteness, like in John Hejduk’s projects. My professional opinion is that the Portland Building is already cute, but it’s just funny to add more to it as Postmodernism is already such a strange collection of kitbashed parts. But to take Brutalism and make it cute? Perhaps in the comments section we can find out if it was a successful endeavor.

There’s really a 50 year lifespan for a building. It’s strange our own lifespan is longer than many buildings. That’s where cuteness could be quite useful; if it’s adorable and you love it, you can’t demolish it or throw it away.

Who in particular do you hope plays the game?

Everyone! The intention was to produce familiarity and engender affection with the architectural artifact through the process of play and participation. It’s not limited to an audience of architects. Preston Scott Cohen has already played it, so it’d be cool if Uncle Rem would play it and send me a reaction video and a screen shot of what he made.The objective is to produce participation through the dissemination of images; it’s how we communicate today.

Why choose a Japanese-inspired aesthetic of cuteness in the explanatory video for OAC?

Initially the game itself began as a gameshow, and the video became a means for producing suspension of disbelief in an audience. In the same way that OAC is asking the building subjects to get into character, there was an interest in how gameshows can ask participants to get into character. It was also a way of explaining something that doesn’t necessarily need to be explained; I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I added a false narrative to it. It seemed appropriate because the buildings became the same false narratives and the production of false realities that could be entirely possible or begin to influence the future of the projects that were chosen.

Ornamentation and coloration are often maligned in current architecture discourse, while both are tactics used by OAC to endear people to endangered architectures. Do you think OAC’s aesthetic could actually be used against preservation efforts to make the building less appealing?

OAC’s audience is not an audience of architects, it’s a general public that cannot bridge the gap between disciplinary conversation and taste. It’s kitsch. At a certain point the OAC aesthetics should become the background, but produce an engagement with an audience that allows the participants to be cute, to behave in a cute way. The objective is to produce participation through the dissemination of images; it’s how we communicate today.

What will become of OAC now that you’ve presented your thesis?



Thesis projects should be a point of origin for any architect’s body of work, so it never quite occurred to me that OAC would end. The objective was to make something that was real and potentially impactful, not boards that hang in a gallery for one hour during the review. OAC exists and the game exists outside of the world of a thesis review; hopefully it could make an audience aware of these particular buildings that need care, and need an audience that will want to keep them around.

This feature is part of Archinect's special editorial focus on Games for August 2016. Click here for related pieces.