Whimsical Gesture

    Rooted in the discourse of architectural animation, from the work of Patrick Schumacher’s Autopoiesis of Architecture to Greg Lynn’s Animate Form, this body of research pairs whimsy with motion. By drawing upon cultural traditions of the carnivalesque, chaos, randomness, and fun, this research provokes and questions the ways in which animate architecture and its iterative nature might offer a voice of joy, complexity, and possibility. From the practical application of whimsy in urban settings, to the rhetorical drawing boards of firms worldwide, I suggest the use of temporality and motion as a means to probe our guarded and historically sensitive cultural relationship with amusement.