The Temple of Laughter was a pioneering project for The Game of Architecture in the sense that it played with the rules of the architectural competition. As the submission requirements called for a drawing and a model this raised the possibility: could the drawing literally build the model? This action would be confrontational as it would, for example, render architectural representation pointless. In architectural culture, the architects’ drawings are the principle design tool conveying information ranging from ideological expression through to construction detailing. Yet with the Temple of Laughter the drawing was purely a 2d plane emptied of all information such that the drawing was now a flat geometric plan(e) awaiting transformation, origami-like, into a three dimensional form. The question was how could we work out the geometrical puzzle that would allow this to happen? WHAT_Architecture used a hybrid “8-bit parametricism” of part-analogue (paper), part-digital (computer) modelling to crack the problem.

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