Big Duck

The Big Duck is a duck-shaped building in Flanders, New York, and tall to the top of the head, enclosing of interior space, it was designed in 1931 by duck farmer Martin Maurer for use as a farm shop as well as for publicity. Duck farming started on the east end of Long Island as a means for farmers to earn additional income, possibly in the early 19th century. The regional industry expanded when the America Pekin breed was introduced to the area in 1873 and by 1915, included nearly a dozen farms with a combined annual production of one million ducks. In 1939, approximately 90 farms in Suffolk County were producing 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, was left; the Corwin family which runs the farm has owned property in the area since 1640. == Construction ==

Maurer was inspired by a building he had seen during a 1931 trip to California, driving cross-country in a Model A Ford. 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. Labor costs totalled $3,800 (). 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. The "Big Duck" name dates back to at least 1937, when a newspaper ad proclaimed "The Big Duck ... Now Open!" In 1937, Maurer had the building lifted from its foundation and relocated from its original Riverhead location to his new duck ranch in Flanders, away. The move of the structure to the airport never happened and the building was returned to its original 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 to prepare the route. The current location of the building is accessible via the Long Island Railroad, 15 minutes by bicycle or 8 minutes by car from the Riverhead station. == Popular reaction ==

Buildings such as this are classified as novelty architecture or memetic architecture. However, in architecture the term "duck" is used more specifically to describe buildings that are in the shape of an everyday object to which they relate. The building was the target of widespread criticism during the 1960s and early 1970s, but did have its defenders. 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 back 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, noting that the latter tradition began in 1931, the year of the Big Duck's construction. In 1987, the Big Duck was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and also on the New York State Register of Historic Places == Academic commentary ==

Architecture Academic interest in the building began in 1964 with Peter Blake's ''God's Own Junkyard. Blake, the managing editor of Architectural Forum, wrote that his book was "a deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain". Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her New York Times'' book review that it was "a primer on the uglification of America the Beautiful" which decried, among other things, the "babel of billboards" and googie architecture. She noted that most of the book consisted of pairs of photographs illustrating the stark contrast between how things were vs how they should be. The Big Duck merited a two-page spread with Blake's own photo of the building and its adjacent highway displayed opposite photos by Marion Post Wolcott and John Vachon showing idyllic scenes of families with small children playing among ducks at the edge of a pond. Blake was familiar with the building from summers he had previously spent in the nearby Hamptons. By 1972, James Wines, writing in Architectural Forum, observed that the Big Duck was often being used as a negative example by architects and critics writing in academic publications, tracing this negative connotation 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". In their 1977 book, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown said that "Sometimes the building is the sign" and noted that this buildingwhich they referred to as "The Long Island Duckling"was a "sculptural symbol and architectural shelter". 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". And in a 1984 essay, Howard Mansfield wrote that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had become known as "a duck factory". Information design Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information uses the term "duck" in a different context, saying it is explicitly named after this building, to describe irrelevant decorative elements in information design: == See also ==