Kayla Manalo

Advisor: Terri Fuglem

A collage titled "The Architecture of Amusement: Memory, Distortion, and the Urban Spectacle" shows a wooden cabinet filled with miniature architectural models. Text on the right discusses amusement architecture, exploring themes of memory and spectacle. The tone is contemplative and analytical.
Blue sketch of a vintage dresser overlays grid paper with technical drawings. Red annotations highlight features, creating a creative design blueprint feel.
Building of the Cabinet
Abstract geometric artwork with a complex maze of colorful squares, circles, and lines on a white grid. The design is intricate, playful, and dynamic.
Sam Jacob, Empire of Ice Cream (2013), fragmented architectural plans and memory; a speculative project.
A detailed black-and-white sketch of Disneyland features iconic attractions like a castle and Main Street highlighted in blue. Overlaying diagrams show park layout, blending fantasy with structured planning.
The Architectures of Amusement: Mapping Disney
Metallic toy structure labeled "The Funhouse," with a colorful clown figurine and balloons, evokes a whimsical and playful carnival theme.
The Mechanical Funhouse: Uncanny in the Ordinary

THE ARCHITECTURE OF AMUSEMENT:
MEMORY, DISTORTION, AND THE URBAN SPECTACLE

Is there beauty in feeling lost or disoriented? This thesis explores amusement as a framework for understanding how architecture influences emotional experience within familiar environments. Set in Winnipeg, the project draws from Guy Maddin’s film My Winnipeg, which portrays the city as a dreamlike landscape where memory, nostalgia, and collective myth overlap. In this context, nostalgia, often understood as sentimental and comforting, can become unstable and unsettling when revisited over time, through repetition, and through personal memory. Familiar landscapes of joy and domestic life begin to distort, exposing the fragility beneath collective and individual recollection.

Historical and contemporary architectures of amusement, such as the Crystal Palace, Expo 67, Coney Island, and the themed environments of Disney, are examined as spaces that promise pleasure, escapism, and coherence while relying on concealed systems of control, illusion, and emotional choreography. The thesis begins to ask how these environments, designed for enjoyment, might also generate anxiety, disorientation, or discomfort, and what occurs when the mechanisms behind architectural delight are exposed.

Personal memory becomes a critical site of inquiry. Drawings and studies of childhood homes located within The Maples, a suburban neighborhood characterized by repetition, familiarity, and domestic routine, are reimagined as fragmented and unstable architectures. These domestic reconstructions are paired with studies of local recreational spaces, such as neighborhood playgrounds and tot lots, where play, exposure, and vulnerability coexist. Together, these sites are reconsidered as emotional infrastructures rather than neutral settings of daily life.

The thesis reframes ordinary and overlooked spaces as fragments of an ‘urban funhouse.’ Rather than offering escape, the project proposes architecture as a medium for confrontation. By employing techniques of reveal and conceal, distortion, and altered modes of interaction, the work positions the city as a living cabinet of curiosities, where wonder and unease coexist within the same spatial condition.