Character

Architecture can be funny, eliciting a laugh or a smirk. It can have a backstory. It can be a in an urban drama.

But how far do you push it?

- Samuel Medina

Laurel Consuelo Broughton designs and makes handbags in the shape of cartoonish archetypes. Among her popular wares are a cocktail purse made to look like a slab of toast, a teardrop wristlet, and a strawberry clutch. But in a reverse translation of the pillbox hat, she also designs buildings that draw on this same Pop menagerie. Monumental toothbrushes, top hats the size of a city block, and cloud-scraping cordless phones— she equally delights in the Brobdingnagian.

You may think “novelty architecture,” or even of Robert Venturi’s polemical use of the “Long Island duck,” but Broughton, who lives in L.A. and teaches at USC, resists both. Her interest, she says, lies in “playing with misreading the object as it gets scaled up or down.” The idea that a building can be read—or misread—is one she shares with several other young architects whose work could be said to be in a neo-Postmodernist vein.

Paul Andersen also works in this register. Based in Denver, he and collaborator Paul Preissner were approached about building a pavilion in Millennium Park timed to the first Chicago Architecture Biennial two years ago. Called Summer Vault, the sky-blue structure was a simple rhombus topped with a vault, yet an angled interior wall complicated things. In plan, the design was straightforward, without any geometric distortions, but the built object was difficult to make sense of. “There was no ideal view of it. It was enigmatic in that way,” Andersen says. (The project was designed with a vendor in mind, but none were forthcoming; the lack of an obvious use surely contributed to the folly’s perplexing appearance.)