Overly Attached Cute is a new interactive game developed by Joanna Grant as her MArch thesis at Princeton (Advised by Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith). The web-based project proposes three classical buildings in which you will be able to attribute new materialities of 'cuteness', identity, architecture or impolite appearances onto historical buildings in order to be aware of how your attributes contribute or damage to the existing building. 

Joanna Grant's buildings are Michael Graves' Portland Building, Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, and Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower that you're playing with. Grant explains in her thesis: 

''Cute is a representation of the real, but an ideal real. It is the opposite of seriousness but somehow represents the gravity of serious. If an obsession with cuteness is the foil to the overbearing weight of Japanese obligations, then it is, in fact, a method of talking about what is truly significant. If comedy is a means through which serious issues such as racism, classism, and sexism can be discussed in an open environment, then perhaps the “cute” is a means through which issues of aesthetics can be discussed. Just as it is not proper to mention politics at a social function, it is similarly impolite to discuss matters of formalism despite the fact that the discipline of architecture is inherently formal and subject to whimsy. Perhaps cuteness can act as a Trojan horse to talk about impolite matters, exactly in the same way that it responds to the strict cultural codes of Asia.''

''If certain words such as “postmodernism,” “composition,” “figuration,” “kitsch,” “delight,” and—perhaps the most evil word of them all—“Formalism” are now considered as politically incorrect in the context of architectural theory, then perhaps the inherent cuteness of architecture can allow certain impolite topics to proliferate. Think of the viral quality of cat photos on the Internet. Why has architecture been the slowest to respond to a culture of instantaneous memes, even if only in a representational format? The distance between what is real and what is representational is the most logical place for cuteness to begin to its rapid and giddy infectiousness. Style has long been distanced from the discipline but in the case of lifestyle, it remains popular and current. As Clement Greenberg states, “To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility.''

In the Overly Attached Cute, the objective is to intervene in the preservation process of buildings who style is no longer relevant, no longer enjoyed, and subject to neglect and decay. The game's objective is to defend architecturally significant landmarks that are not yet preserved by the National Historic Trust. Buildings most at risk for demolition are not conventionally considered to be beautiful by a general public. The past five decades has demonstrated remarkable leaps in architectural innovation that has resulted in the expansion of a disciplinary sensibility, but this has been limited to a small audience of architects.

Overly Attached Cute seeks to broaden the audience of architecture through the process of education. We seek to educate an audience on defunct styles of the past and to exhibit the vulnerability of these disappearing styles.

All images screenshot from Overly Attached Cute.

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