Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed

Author: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Year: 1971 Source type: article Raw file: raw/articles/venturi-scott-brown_1971-ugly-and-ordinary-decorated-shed.md

Relationship to Learning from Las Vegas

This is not a different edition or a separate work but the journal pre-publication excerpt of Part II of *Learning from Las Vegas*, printed in two installments before the MIT Press publication (1972): Part I, "Some Definitions Using the Comparative Method," in Architectural Forum, November 1971, and Part II, "Theory of Ugly and Ordinary and Related and Contrary Concepts," in Architectural Forum, December 1971 (citation verified against the Venturi Scott Brown & Associates bibliography, venturiscottbrown.org). The editors' notes in both installments confirm the series: an earlier portion, "A Significance for A & P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas," had appeared in the March 1968 issue. The article is bylined Venturi and Scott Brown only (Izenour is named as the book's third author); its wording differs in places from the 1977 revised edition, so quotes attributed to the article must be checked against this text, not against the book note. The raw extract carries no printed page numbers, so quotes below cite section names.

Summary

In two installments, the article develops the argument of Part II of Learning from Las Vegas: against the "heroic and original" expressionism of Modern architecture, Venturi and Scott Brown propose "ugly and ordinary" architecture — conventional systems of space, structure and program carrying applied, denotative symbolism, the decorated shed. The Guild House / Crawford Manor comparison (two elderly housing projects of the same use, size and date) demonstrates the difference: Guild House's ornament is explicit and "looks like what it is"; Crawford Manor's implicit, connotative symbolism distorts the whole building into "one big ornament" — a duck. The second installment generalizes the theory: Colquhoun's "bio-technical determinism" diagnosis of Modern theory, the industrial iconography Modernism substituted for historical symbolism unadmitted, articulation and space as displaced ornament, the defense of Levittown's builders' vernacular and its suburban iconography, and the concluding program: "architecture as symbol in space before form in space," with "the archetypal Los Angeles… our Rome and Las Vegas our Florence."

Key Claims

Duck vs. decorated shed, first formulated in print: "Where the architectural systems of space, structure and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form… we call the duck"; "Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them… the decorated shed." Both are valid ("Chartres is a duck… and the Palazzo Farnese is a decorated shed"), but the duck "is seldom relevant today although it pervades Modern architecture."
The Guild House / Crawford Manor comparison: two highrise apartments for the elderly of about 90 units, mid-1960s. "The system of construction and program of Guild House is ordinary and conventional and looks it; the system of construction and program of Crawford Manor is ordinary and conventional but doesn't look it." Explicit vs. implicit association is the hinge: Guild House symbolism "looks like what it is, not only because of what it is but also because of what it reminds you of"; Crawford Manor's meanings are read into "the undecorated physiognomy of the building" from knowledge of technology and the Modern form-givers.
Guild House as the "architect's decorated shed": ornament both reinforces and contradicts the form it adorns — the white-glazed-brick stripes suggest a Renaissance palace's three stories over six real floors; the arched window, the "giant order" (or "classic jukebox front"), and the unconnected gold-anodized television antenna that is "both an imitation of an abstract Lippold sculpture and a symbol for the elderly."
Modern architecture's expressionism is empty and irresponsible: by rejecting denotative ornament it "distorted the whole building into one big ornament. In substituting 'articulation' for decoration, it has become a duck."
Heroic and original vs. ugly and ordinary as content of symbolism: H&O architecture gives off abstract "expressions" from the physiognomic character of its elements; U&O architecture includes denotative meanings from familiar elements — the U&O fire station is identified by the conventions of roadside architecture, "not to mention the conspicuous sign that identifies it through spelling, the most denotative of symbols: FIRE STATION NO. 4."
Colquhoun's bio-technical determinism: Modern architectural theory took physical laws and empirical facts as the fundamental source of form, while simultaneously claiming intuition and free expression — "a tension of two apparently contradictory ideas." The result: "What appears on the surface as a hard, rational discipline of design, turns out rather paradoxically to be a mystical belief in the intuitive process." (See bio-technical-determinism.)
The Vitruvian equation collapse: Vitruvius (via Wotton) made architecture Firmness, Commodity and Delight; Gropius implied "Firmness and Commodity equal Delight" — structure plus program simply producing form, "architecture is frozen process." Even Maillart's bridges and Freyssinet's hangars "are hardly architecture" — their unavoidable symbolic content was ignored.
Industrial iconography unadmitted: the early Modern movement explicitly adapted industrial models (Le Corbusier's grain elevators, Gropius's Faguswerk/Bauhaus, Mies's linear industrial buildings) for their symbolic content, then denied symbolism; "Modern architects have substituted one set of symbols (Cubist-industrial-process) for another (Romantic-historical-eclecticism) but without being aware of it."
Articulation as ornament, and space as displaced symbolism: Modern architects "indulge in distortion and overarticulation" — "busy bumps and subtle dents" as "irrelevant and meaningless as the pilaster bas-relief on a Renaissance palace" at highway speeds; "space is what displaced symbolism: space dramatized by an acrobatic use of light."
Against Total Design and design review: "Total design is the opposite of the incremental city that grows through the decisions of many"; design review boards promote "rule-by-man rather than rule-by-law procedures," and "'Total Design' comes to mean 'total control.'" "No architecture is not the answer to too much architecture."
Misplaced technological zeal: architects' prefabrication research ignored the aspects (financing, distribution, conventional trades) that actually determine cost and form; the mobile home industry, "without the architects' help," produces one-fifth of annual US housing output — "Architects should forget about being great technical innovators in housing construction."
Learning from Levittown: the suburban vernacular's symbolism is legible but refused by architects who "can discern the symbolism in the forms of their own vernacular" only when it is remote (Mykonos, the Dogon); suburban doodads "have a spatial as well as a symbolic role: Their forms identify vast space as do the urns in Le Notre's parterres, the ruined temples in English parks, and the sign in the A&P parking lot." "Many people like suburbia. This is the compelling reason for learning from Levittown."
Symbolism before social architecture: "We architects who hope for a reallocation of national resources toward social purposes must take care to lay the emphasis on the purposes and their promotion rather than on the architecture that shelters them" — and Revolutionary eras are given to didactic symbolism: "Ledoux was a propagandist and symbolist before he was a formalist. He saw… architecture as symbol in space before form in space."
The concluding program: "then the archetypal Los Angeles will be our Rome and Las Vegas our Florence; and, like the archetypal grain elevator some generations ago, the Flamingo sign will be the cylindrical model to shock our sensibilities towards a new architecture."
The Ruskin/Pugin coda: "When Modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornamented. In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament they distorted the whole building into a duck." It is time to re-evaluate Ruskin's "architecture is the decoration of construction," appending "the warning of Pugin, it is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration."
"We have been designing dead ducks." — the article's verdict on the unacknowledged symbolism of current Modern architecture.

Connections

Concepts: decorated-shed, the-duck, ugly-and-ordinary, denotative-symbolism, connotative-symbolism, architectural-ornament, symbolism, commercial-vernacular, bio-technical-determinism, commodity-firmness-and-delight, pop-art, urban-sprawl, suburbanism, popular-culture

Authors: venturi-robert, scott-brown-denise, colquhoun-alan, le-corbusier, loos-adolf, giedion-sigfried, blake-peter

Debates: postmodernism-vs-modernism, ornament-vs-purity, spectacle-vs-function, vernacular-architecture-debate

Related source notes: *Learning from Las Vegas* (1977) — the book this article pre-publishes (Part II); Fifty Years of "Learning from Las Vegas" (Hawthorne 2023) — retrospective assessment.

Direct Quotes

The raw extract carries no printed page numbers; quotes cite the installment and section. OCR spacing artifacts in the raw file have been repaired within quoted words.

"We shall emphasize image—image over process or form—in asserting that architecture depends in its perception and creation on past experience and emotional association, and that these symbolic and representational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure and program with which they combine in the same building." (Part I, introduction)

"The duck is the special building that is a symbol, the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. We maintain that both kinds of architecture are valid—Chartres is a duck (although it is a decorated shed as well) and the Palazzo Farnese is a decorated shed—but we think that the duck is seldom relevant today although it pervades Modern architecture." (Part I, introduction)

"The system of construction and program of Guild House is ordinary and conventional and looks it; the system of construction and program of Crawford Manor is ordinary and conventional but doesn't look it." (Part I, The Duck & the Decorated Shed)

"Guild House symbolism involves ornament and is more or less dependent on explicit associations; it looks like what it is, not only because of what it is but also because of what it reminds you of." (Part I, Explicit and Implicit Associations)

"When it cast out eclecticism, Modern architecture submerged symbolism. Instead it promoted expressionism, concentrating on the expression of architectural elements themselves: on the expression of structure and function." (Part I, Is Boring Architecture Interesting?)

"ironically the Modern architecture of Crawford Manor, while rejecting explicit symbolism and frivolous appliance ornament, has distorted the whole building into one big ornament. In substituting 'articulation' for decoration, it has become a duck." (Part I, Is Boring Architecture Interesting?)

"They turned out 'ugly and ordinary,' as two such divergent critics as Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft have described our work." (Part II, introduction)

"The familiar which is a little off has a strange and revealing power." (Part II, Ugly and Ordinary)

"What appears on the surface as a hard, rational discipline of design, turns out rather paradoxically to be a mystical belief in the intuitive process." (Part II, Symbolism and Association, quoting Colquhoun)

"Presumed in these equations is that process and image are never contradictory… Architecture is frozen process." (Part II, Firmness + Commodity = Delight)

"The architects of the early Modern movement, in discarding the admittedly obsolete symbolism of historical eclecticism, substituted that of the industrial vernacular." (Part II, Industrial Iconography)

"Modern architects have substituted one set of symbols (Cubist-industrial-process) for another (Romantic-historical-eclecticism) but without being aware of it. This has made for confusion and ironic contradictions that are still with us." (Part II, Symbolism Unadmitted)

"Total design is the opposite of the incremental city that grows through the decisions of many." (Part II, Megastructures and Design Control)

"'Total Design' comes to mean 'total control.'" (Part II, Megastructures and Design Control)

"As Philip Johnson said, you can't put a door in a geodesic dome." (Part II, Misplaced Technological Zeal)

"Architects should forget about being great technical innovators in housing construction and concentrate on adapting this new and useful technology to more broadly defined needs than it serves today and on developing a vivid mobile home symbolism for mass markets." (Part II, Misplaced Technological Zeal)

"Many people like suburbia. This is the compelling reason for learning from Levittown." (Part II, From LaTourette to Lewittown)

"Modern architects… reject whole sets of dominant social patterns because they don't like the architectural consequences of these patterns." (Part II, From LaTourette to Lewittown)

"These architects reject the very heterogeneity of our society that makes the social sciences relevant to architecture in the first place." (Part II, From LaTourette to Lewittown)

"He saw, as we must see, architecture as symbol in space before form in space." (Part II, Social Architecture and Symbolism, on Ledoux)

"Then the archetypal Los Angeles will be our Rome and Las Vegas our Florence; and, like the archetypal grain elevator some generations ago, the Flamingo sign will be the cylindrical model to shock our sensibilities towards a new architecture." (Part II, Social Architecture and Symbolism)

"When Modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornamented. In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament they distorted the whole building into a duck." (Part II, High Design Architecture)

"It is now time to re-evaluate the once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction; but we should append the warning of Pugin, it is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration." (Part II, High Design Architecture)

"We have been designing dead ducks." (Part II, High Design Architecture)

Open Questions

The article's wording differs from the 1977 revised edition in places (e.g., the "space" sentence reads "defied by critics" here, "deified by critics" in the book note's quotation). Which variants are authorial revision and which are OCR artifacts? Any quote attributed to the book should be verified against the book text, and vice versa.
The article mentions the third excerpt announced for the December 1971 issue's companion installment and the March 1968 "A Significance for A & P Parking Lots" — neither is in the wiki; should the Forum excerpt series be completed?
Guild House's sign and the antenna: the article's built-criticism (the "architect's decorated shed" as built polemic) is a mode of architectural argument the wiki covers only indirectly — does it warrant its own concept page?
How does the article's defense of suburban iconography read from the post-suburban present (see suburbanism, real-existing-suburbia) — as the reversal's prehistory, or as the populism its later critics (Hayden, the New Urbanists) were answering?