27 February 2019

This is a "duck"


The photo shows the Kamil Gulec Library in Turkey - its exterior designed to resemble a shelf of books (there is a similarly-designed library in Kansas City, Missouri).

Today I learned that there is a term for this sort of contrivance -
"Robert Venturi coined the term. He saw a building, literally in the shape and appearance of a Duck and coined the term from there. Buildings that are intended to look like 'things' are therefore referred to as 'Ducks'."
The Longaberger office building comes immediately to mind.  There must be many others.

6 comments:

  1. Maybe you meant Kansas City having an exterior like that. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kansas-city-library-s-giant-bookshelf
    I'm in St. Louis and haven't heard or seen of a facade here like that. Big fan of TYWKIWDBI. Thank you so much for enriching my life.

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    1. You're absolutely correct, Ken. I used to live in St. Louis and somehow misremembered this oddity. Fixed. Thank you.

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  2. And, in the words of the great Chico Marx, "Why a duck? Why not a chicken?"

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    1. The architects would respond to you by saying "viaduct."

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  3. Literally a big duck building in Long Island, NY: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Duck

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  4. Robert Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown coined the "duck" and "decorated shed" monikers in their book Learning From Las Vegas. The duck is their shorthand for a building that is what it is: it doesn't need signage or any other kind of signifiers to tell the viewer what it is. The decorated shed is a generic building that relies on signs to tell the viewer what it is. There's a very succinct overview here: http://thearchitecturalmirror.blogspot.com/2009/03/ducks-and-sheds.html.

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