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_ Big Duck _
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Introduction
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The Big Duck is a 20 ft ferrocement building in the shape of a
duck: a canonical example of novelty architecture. Built in 1931 in
Riverhead, New York, United States, it was moved several times to
various locations on eastern Long Island, ending up in Flanders in
2007. Well-known for its distinctive appearance, this structure
inspired the word 'duck' as a common term in academic literature
used to refer to buildings shaped like everyday objects or to
describe excessive ornamentation used in graphical presentations of
data.
The Big Duck was built in 1931 by duck farmer Martin Maurer for use
as a shop to sell ducks and duck eggs. This was during a period
when duck farming was a growing industry on eastern Long Island and
novelty architecture was on the rise due to the increasing
popularity of automobiles. The building attracted both widespread
academic criticism and public acclaim. It was added to both the
National Register of Historic Places and the New York State
Register of Historic Places in 1997 and is a principal building on
the Big Duck Ranch, which was listed on both registers in 2008.
Background
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The Big Duck is a duck-shaped building in Flanders, New York, in
plan and 20 ft tall to the top of the head, enclosing of interior
space. An example of novelty architecture (also known as mimetic
architecture), it was designed in 1931 by duck farmer Martin Maurer
for use as a farm shop as well as for publicity. The use of mimetic
architecture for roadside buildings was a growing trend in the
United States by the late 1920s, with buildings having been
constructed in the shape of a giant milk bottle, a tea kettle, a
dog, and a tepee. The increasing popularity of the automobile meant
that people were driving past roadside stores at high speed,
necessitating large displays (described by landscape
preservationist John Auwaerter as being of "bizarre scale") to
attract the attention of passing motorists.
Duck farming on the east end of Long Island started as a means for
farmers to earn additional income, possibly in the early 19th
century. The regional industry expanded when the American Pekin
breed was introduced to the area in 1873; by 1915 it included
nearly a dozen farms with a combined annual production of one
million ducks. In 1939, approximately 90 farms in Suffolk County
were producing an aggregate of three million ducks annually; many
of these were out of business by the 1980s due to changing
environmental regulations and increased real-estate prices. By
2015, only the Crescent Duck Farm, which had opened in 1908 in
Aquebogue, remained.
Maurer was inspired by a building he had seen during a 1931 trip to
California. He had stopped at the Ben-Hur Coffee Shop on Wilshire
Boulevard in Los Angeles which was topped by a 15-foot tall stucco
coffee pot. Reportedly, Maurer started planning the Big Duck while
eating lunch that day, sketching the design on a napkin.
Construction
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The Big Duck opened for business in June 1931, selling ducks and
duck eggs. In August, Maurer applied for a trademark for "The Big
Duck Ranch"; it was granted a year later, renewed in 1972, and
expired in 1993. The building was featured on the Atlas Cement
Company's 1931 promotional calendar and the November 1932 issue of
'Popular Mechanics' covered it briefly, noting that it contained a
salesroom and an office and sat on a foundation of concrete blocks.
A miniature version was installed at the 1939 World's Fair by the
Drake Baking Company, with the condition that it be destroyed once
the fair was over.
Relocations
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The building was originally constructed in 1931 on West Main Street
(New York State Route 25) in the Upper Mills section of Riverhead.
In 1937, Maurer had the building lifted from its foundation and
relocated to his new duck ranch in Flanders, 4 mi away.
The Big Duck closed as a store in 1984. Four years later, the
Suffolk County Department of Parks and Recreation acquired the
building, moved it to Sears Bellows County Park between Flanders
and Hampton Bays, and repurposed it as a gift shop operated by the
Friends for Long Island Heritage. The Department of Parks
publicized the move with a "Lost My Nest" sign soliciting
donations; keeping with the mimetic theme, it was shaped like a
giant suitcase with a handle on top.
In 2004, a proposal was made to move the Big Duck to Long Island
MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, with the move estimated to cost at
least $60,000 (value=60000). Proponents suggested this would
increase the number of visitors and help publicize the airport's
new terminal building but the move never happened and the building
was returned to its 1937 Flanders location on October 6, 2007.
Local house moving contractor Guy Davis donated the cost of the
four-mile move and the Town of Southampton picked up the $50,000 in
costs (value=50000) to prepare the route. The location of the
building is accessible from the Long Island Rail Road via the
Riverhead station.
Popular reaction
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Buildings such as the Big Duck are classified as novelty or mimetic
architecture, with the term 'duck' used more specifically to
describe buildings that are in the shape of an everyday object to
which they relate. In 1997, the Big Duck was listed on the National
Register of Historic Places and also on the New York State Register
of Historic Places. The Big Duck Ranch, where the Big Duck is
located, was individually added to the National Register in 2008.
A drawing of the building by Saul Steinberg was featured on the May
11, 1987, cover of 'The New Yorker'. In her 2015 book, historian
Marilyn Weigold called the building an "impressive piece of folk
art". In a tradition dating to 1988, the Big Duck is lit up for
Christmas each year, with local residents attending the ceremony.
Joshua Needelman of 'Newsday' compared the event to the annual
lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City, noting
that the latter tradition began in 1931, the year of the Big Duck's
construction.
An attempt was made in 1997 to turn the structure into a museum
consisting of fifteen buildings typical of an early 20th-century
Long Island roadside. The project had been proposed by the Suffolk
County Department of Parks with support from the New York Council
on the Arts but was unable to make any progress due to insufficient
funding and legal obstacles. The latter included land-use
regulations protecting the surrounding pine barren and a lawsuit
which prevented a planned donation of a diner from being completed.
Architecture
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Peter Blake, the managing editor of 'Architectural Forum', was one
of the first architects to criticize the Big Duck, offering a
pessimistic view of the building and the commercialism it
represented in his 1964 book 'God's Own Junkyard.' In the preface,
he wrote that his book was "a deliberate attack upon all those who
have already befouled a large portion of this country for private
gain" and Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her 'New York Times' book
review that it decried the "babel of billboards" and
automobile-focused Googie architecture. Blake was familiar with the
building from summers he had spent in the nearby Hamptons; he
presented his own photo of it opposite those by Marion Post Wolcott
and John Vachon showing idyllic scenes of families with small
children playing among ducks at the edge of a pond.
Architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote about
'ducks' in a 1971 'Architectural Forum' article without explicitly
defining what they meant by the term as they would in later
publications. The two stated that modernist architects had ceased
to apply ornamentation to their designs and were instead making the
buildings themselves the ornamentation: "In promoting Space and
Articulation over symbolism and ornament they distorted the whole
building into a 'duck'." They concluded the article by urging their
peers to heed the advice of 19th-century architect Augustus Pugin
that it was "all right to decorate construction but never to
construct decoration".
More famously, Venturi and Scott Brown wrote about the disparity
between highway signs that advertise businesses and the buildings
that house those businesses in their 1977 book, 'Learning from Las
Vegas.' Using U.S. Route 66 as an example, they observed that the
signs are large, vulgar, and consume a disparate portion of the
business's budget. The buildings on the other hand are smaller,
more modest, and cheap. They contrasted this with the Big Duckwhich
they referred to as "The Long Island Duckling"calling it a
"sculptural symbol and architectural shelter", noting that
"Sometimes the building is the sign." They used the term 'duck' to
refer to "a special building that 'is' a symbol", as differentiated
from a "conventional shelter that 'applies' symbols", which they
called a "decorated shed". Seven years after 'Las Vegas', Howard
Mansfield wrote that the book had resulted in the 'duck' becoming a
"popular character actor", working its way into the academic
vernacular and appearing frequently in journals such as
'Architectural Forum.' Huxtable referred to 'ducks' often in her
reviews, to describe "buildings straining after symbolism when
there is nothing to symbolize."
By 1972, James Wines, writing in 'Architectural Forum', observed
that the Big Duck was often used as a negative example by
architects and critics writing in academic publications, tracing
this back to Blake. Wines called the building "an extraordinary
example of indigenous American roadway architecture" although he
described the scale of the building as "absurd", saying that it was
"too small for a store and too big for a duck". He said the Big
Duck ignores the modernist axiom that form follows function and
posited the alternative Duck Design Theory, that "form follows
fantasy".
Architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy argued in 'American
Autopia' that the Big Duck's immortality came not from Blake's
original inclusion as one photo out of more than a hundred, but
from Venturi and Scott Brown's "appropriation" of the building in
their own book. She credited 'Learning from Las Vegas' with
inspiring roadside photographer John Margolies to make his own
image of the building and leading to its inclusion on the National
Register. In another historical treatment, Luis Miguel Lus Arana
and Gabriele Neri also ascribed the Big Duck's fame to Venturi,
adding that the building possesses a "proud obliviousness to its
own tackiness". Journalist Phil Patton presented a different view
in 'The All-American Roadside.' He argued that the Big Duck's path
to notoriety had to do not so much with its form, but rather with
an accident of its location that exposed it to New York's
architectural and artistic circles. In addition to being near Peter
Blake's summer home, it was not far from the house of well-known
artist Jackson Pollock.
Architecture professor Caroline O'Donnell used the Big Duck as an
example of architecture parlante in her 2015 book 'Niche Topics.'
She defined the term, coined in 1852, as "an expression of
programmatic meaning through form in a humorous and sometimes
provocative way". The fact that the building looked funny was a key
differentiator between being merely a 'decorated shed' and being a
'duck'. Humanities professor Margaret Grubiak examined the Ark
Encounter Christian theme park in her 2020 treatment of religious
architecture, 'Monumental Jesus.' She described the park's
full-scale recreation of Noah's Ark as "an architectural paradox of
sculpture and building" and compared it to the Big Duck for the
literalist advertising function they both perform.
Information design
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Information scientist and statistician Edward Tufte's 'The Visual
Display of Quantitative Information' uses the term 'duck' in a
different context, saying it is explicitly named after the Big Duck
to describe irrelevant decorative elements in information design:
Tufte describes 'ducks' as "flamboyant" and "marginally useful",
lumping them into the larger category of "chartjunk".
License
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All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Duck
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