Behold, the architectural legacy of millennials: Emoji on buildings
When you think of beautiful architecture, you probably don't think of emoji. But that could change, thanks to architect Changiz Tehrani.
He designed a building in the Netherlands that features 22 concrete-casted emoji as decorative flair. The idea resulted from Tehrani's musings about what he could include on the building that would mark it as from the 21st century.
When you think about it like that, emoji actually make a lot of sense.
According to The Verge, the emoji will only appear on one side of the multi-use building. It will feature ground-floor shops with apartments on top, and is located in a square that also features a library and a school.
"There’s all these young people there, and emoji is a thing of now," Tehrani told The Verge in reference to the school that's close to the building. “The students sit in the square and have lunch and they take pictures. They like it. And with our architecture we always like to put in small details that makes the project a little bit more than a boring building.”
Attika Architekten, the Dutch firm behind the emoji building, based the emoji off the ones on WhatsApp. They created each emoji into a 3D model, then had them made into molds which were then used to cast them into concrete.
“I don’t know if older people recognize the emoji,” Tehrani said to The Verge. “But if you have a smartphone, you will have seen them.”
Overall, Tehrani feels the emoji have been received positively. He also isn't worried about the emoji losing value as they inevitably fade away as a trend.
“It’s like with Facebook," Tehrani expressed. "Facebook used to be cool and now it’s just for older people. So maybe we won’t use emoji in 10 years — that’s fine. It’s still from our time.”
Let's hear it for emoji -- the gift our particular moment in history gave the human race.
Christine is a Web Culture Intern at Mashable. She has previously written for FanSided and Saturday Down South. She has a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.S. from Hunter College. Before she started writing, she worked in education as a teacher and school leader for four years. Her special talents include being able to quote The Office on command, playing non-stop Overwatch for hours, and composing only the wittiest of Tweets (her own opinion).
