Unstructured Merriment by Ed Ruscha (2016) overlays a two-word phrase across a photographic image of a Spanish Colonial Revival house in Los Angeles — terracotta walls, tiled roof, mature trees, a driveway in dappled afternoon light. The letters of UNSTRUCTURED MERRIMENT are distributed across the image one character at a time, each letter spaced widely and placed independently across the facade and garden, the word broken into its constituent parts and scattered through the scene like confetti. The typography is italic serif, elegant and slightly formal, the letters white and semi-transparent, present but not insistent.

The architectural subject is specific to Los Angeles in a way that matters. Spanish Colonial Revival was the city's preferred domestic style for much of the early twentieth century — terracotta, arches, courtyard gardens, the whole vocabulary borrowed from a California that was itself partly invented, a romanticised version of Spanish colonial heritage adapted for a climate and a culture that had very little direct connection to its sources. These houses are beautiful and fundamentally theatrical, their style a kind of agreed fiction about where Los Angeles came from and what it wanted to be. Ruscha had been photographing and cataloguing Los Angeles architecture since the 1960s with the attentiveness of someone who understood that the city's built environment was a series of constructed images..

Into that constructed image he introduces UNSTRUCTURED MERRIMENT — a phrase that promises the opposite of what the house delivers. The building is entirely structured: symmetrical arches, disciplined planting, a facade that has been designed to project stability and prosperity. Merriment, unstructured or otherwise, is not obviously what it suggests. The letters scattered across its surface introduce a looseness that the architecture resists, its setting pulling in opposite directions without either winning.

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