Box Is a Box Is a Box

"The Treachery of Images" (1928-29), Rene Magritte

Is Philip Nobel, the "resident curmudgeon" of Metropolis magazine, going soft already? Probably too soon to tell, but historians of such things —€” do such people even exist
yet? —€” may well look back on this moment and say that this was when Philip Nobel started to lose it. Asked why, they will say that it was one part Nobel, one part never-ending crisis of Modernism, one part New York Times Building and, oh, 10 parts New York.

I'll get back to this momentarily, but we needn't wait for the verdict on Philip Nobel to know that, despite "getting one in" occasionally, large-scale Modernist architecture has spent most of the last 40 years on the ropes. Among the first to put it there were architect-scholars Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, with their pithy and generously illustrated 1972 study Learning from Las Vegas. Whether or not you've already read Las Vegas, you should read it now to see how right —€” and how much more wrong —€” the authors turned out to be.

What Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour mostly saw when they surveyed the Modernist built landscape of the late 1960s was "heroic and original" architecture that was irrelevant, they said, because it did not speak with explicit symbols
that most people could understand.

As Experts with Ideals...[Modern architects] build for Man rather than for people —€” this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular middle-class values, which they assign to everyone...Developers build for markets rather than for Man and probably do less harm than authoritarian architects would do if they had the developers' power.

One does not have to agree with hard-hat politics to support the rights of the middle-
middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-
type aesthetics are shared by most members
of the middle-middle class, black as well as white, liberal as well as conservative.

The authors nicknamed "heroic and original" buildings
ducks —€” after a duck-shaped poultry stand on Long Island that appears in Peter Blake's 1964 book God's Own Junkyard. These were buildings "[w]here the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form": a "kind of building-becoming-
sculpture."


The "Long Island Duckling" (1931), in Flanders, N.Y.

The B-side of the authors' class critique was that ducks
were not only aesthetically elitist but unnecessarily —€”
and inappropriately —€” expensive:

We architects who hope for a reallocation of national resources toward social purposes must take care to lay emphasis on the purposes and their promotion rather than on the architecture that shelters them.  This reorientation will call for ordinary architecture, not ducks. But when there is little money to spend on architecture, then surely greatest architectural imagination
is required. Sources for modest buildings and images with social purpose will come, not from the industrial past, but from the everyday city around us, of modest buildings and modest spaces with symbolic appendages.

So it was that, opposed to "heroic and original" ducks, the authors —€” inspired by the schlock commercial architecture
of the Las Vegas strip —€” prescribed an "ordinary and ugly" alternative: decorated sheds. Exactly as mundane as they sound, decorated sheds were buildings "[w]here systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them."

Sketch from Learning from Las Vegas

Summarizing the distinction between duck and shed, the authors wrote: "The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional building
that applies symbols."

For them, ducks were symptoms of a sickness within
the basic culture of architectural design:

To replace ornament and explicit symbolism, Modern architects indulge in distortion and overarticulation. Strident distortion at large scale and "sensitive" articulation at