External doors on an upper floor, odd staircases or chimney stacks that don’t start anywhere: buildings have humour, they can giggle or even laugh out loud. Of course, this seldom applies to entire buildings, usually only to individual elements. Architect and author Lera Smovich calls such elements “mischievous.” They are humorous pranks, although naughty, they don’t cause any harm — uncontrollable but never entirely out of control. Like a joke that you don’t get immediately, they are also intellectual exercises or even problem solvers: humour serves as a coping mechanism that provides solutions under pressure and is expressed in architectural elements. These elements are necessary; they inhabit the space before people occupy it. And if one of the elements ever steps out of line the space is thrown off balance and comes to life, because, as the writer Nabokov puts it, humour is the loss of balance — and the delight this causes.