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Katerina Zacharopoulou

Image: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany: Elevation (1977-1984), James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture
Research

Subject

Designing for Amusement: From the Intention to the Interpretation of Architectural Humour in Post-Modern Britain

Primary and secondary supervisors

  • Robin Wilson
  • Professor Sophia Psarra

Abstract

Humour is often seen as a quality designed to provoke amusement in an artwork, such as a novel or a painting. This aspect of humour has been researched in several arts, but not yet in architecture. It is even seen as an accidental, negative quality in buildings.

Katerina’s research explores this literature gap, asking how humour has been used by architects in design and how it has been received in architectural criticism. The thesis discusses the historical conditions that influenced the rejection of humour in Western architectural history and theory, and argues that the discourse on architectural Postmodernism, especially in Britain, allowed a rudimentary acceptance of humour, albeit still in a suppressed manner. The study claims that humour has been overshadowed by the theoretical focus of irony in relation to Postmodernism. Irony’s theorisation did not only downplay its potential to be amusing, but has also limited the consideration of other ways in which architecture can be amusing.

Through a close reading of specific buildings, reviews of architectural media, archival research and interviews, Katerina’s study aims to explore issues which are not addressed in the existing discussion on architectural humour; what its value is, and how it constitutes a distinct category of meaning.

Biography

Katerina Zacharopoulou is an architect and researcher from Thessaloniki, Greece. She received an Architect Engineer Diploma from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2016 and a History & Critical Thinking in Architecture MA with Distinction in 2017 from the Architectural Association, where she now teaches. Since her undergraduate studies she has developed an interest in the connection between architecture and humour, which she now explores in doctoral studies at UCL, supported by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership. Katerina has talked about this topic at conferences, lectures, and public events internationally, and she is the first architect to have presented a paper at the International Society for Humor Studies Conference, on its 30th anniversary.

Publications

  • Dupuis, A., Kataw, H. and Zacharopoulou, K. (2022) 'In the scale of... a gesture, a discourse, a joke', Canadian Centre for Architecture. Available at: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/85415/in-the-scale-of-a-gesture-a-discourse-a-joke
  • Zacharopoulou, K. (2020) 'From Learning from Las Vegas to “Transparency” and back', in E. Rusek and W. Witalisz (eds.) Across borders: Cultural and linguistic shifts in the 21st century. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang D, pp. 233-244.
  • Zacharopoulou, K. (2020) 'Reclaiming the throne’, ASAP/Journal, 5(3), pp. 574-579.

Funding

London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) Doctoral Training Partnership

Image: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany: Elevation (1977−1984), James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture