Can a building be funny? According to contributing author and editor Michela Rosso and the essayists assembled for Laughing at Architecture, the answer is clearly "yes"-although essential to perceiving the butt of any kind of joke, understanding context counts for a lot. The choice of image for the volume's cover is apropos: an eighteenth-century illustration of London's fashionable elite mounting the vertiginously steep staircase to the Royal Academy at Somerset House on their way to see the new art season's collection of paintings. (Visitors to the Courtauld Institute Gallery today can stumble in their footsteps.) The winding stair at Somerset House-barely reconciling an elegant half-circular plan with the functional requirement of access to multiple levels of the building-must have been as challenging for the architect William Chambers to detail as it was for his patrons to negotiate in person. In the illustration, the art-goers appear falling, head-over-heels, crinolines and fleshy backsides exposed to public view, a satirical slant on salon exhibitionism. Of course, the joke is not about just any old stair, designer or occasion. Rather, the scene relies on context for its comedy, on several forms of insider knowledge-of architectural history, construction, culture and custom, to name a few-although one wouldn't say the drawing is an "inside joke" per se.
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