This Prompts a Range of Emotions: Punchline Wall

SPACE December 2025 (No. 697) 

Life in the contemporary city exposes us to countless flat and monotonous buildings that fail to evoke any emotional response in passersby. From this perspective, HYPERSPANDREL (principal, Chon Jaewoo) proposes a special wall for the Thematic Exhibition of the 5th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. The ‘Punchline Wall’ employs humour as a device to introduce a new form of communication between the wall and the public. It comprises a plain concrete wall and a single signboard placed in front of it, on which a tailored punchline is written for that wall. Humour triggers the release of oxytocin, the neurochemical responsible for social bonding and collective well-being. As a social lubricant, it fosters the warm interpersonal relationships essential to a truly humanised environment. (This explanation, too, may well be a punchline!) In this sense, the Punchline Wall – like the Humanise Wall by Heatherwick Studio (director, Thomas Heatherwick) installed in Songhyeon Green Plaza – demonstrates the potency of communication through text. 

We refer to this as ‘architectural punchline activation’, proposing it as a new method for shaping more humane urban spaces and as one of the most effective ways humour can create memorable urban experiences. The ‘K-Wall Challenge’ is an Instagram-based project in which participants share isometric images of their own walls and tag the next participant to continue the chain. It functions as a collective response to the discourse surrounding the Humanise Wall, not as a ‘direct critique’ but rather as an experiment that takes the impotence of critique itself as its material. The project is also a test as to whether architectural practice can shift from a field of ‘production’ to one of ‘consumption’. Its most tangible outcome is a T-shirt, and its route of consumption is the digital feed. The aim is to explore whether such a gesture can operate not through formal invitations or institutional authority, but by parasitically inhabiting the gaps within official structures. Can an architectural gesture be consumed without a physical exhibition space or institutional approval, and can that consumption be translated back into architectural meaning? 

Punchline Wall (2025)