Architects have always used ornamentation to enliven and inform their work. The Greeks favored caryatids, Gothic designers embraced gargoyles, and the Art Deco era saw the rise of pyramidal motifs. A little more recently, historically speaking, Michael Graves summoned the Seven Dwarves to hold up the pediment of the Team Disney Building.

Dutch architect Changiz Tehrani carries this tradition, for better or worse, into the digital age by incorporating emoji into the facade of an apartment building in Vathorst. The building, located alongside a school and small public square, is fairly traditional with its gridded brick facade intersected by white concrete bands. Those bands looked a bit plain without decoration, Tehrani says, and after kicking around a few ideas, he landed on this highly contemporary idea. “Because the building is very strong, even severe, we wanted some funniness to lighten it up,” he says.

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Although the severe dogma of Modernism all but required architects to shun ornamentation, it enjoyed a comeback of sorts with postmodernism and its classical motifs. 

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“Architecture is serious,” says Sean Khorsandi, a professor of architectural history and theory at New York Institute of Technology. “We’re using copious materials, and we’re taking up land. There is a responsibility that goes along with that. If everything is a joke; reduced to this disposable ‘I like it in the moment’ fad, that’s a dangerous attitude to have.” He says Tehrani’s use of emoji does nothing to advance architectural thought or technology, and finds it telling that most discussion of the building has focused on the emojis, not its fairly pedestrian design.

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