If It Quacks

Peter P. Ward

The Big Duck is a building shaped like a white duck with a yellow bill. If it were a real duck of this size it would be gigantic. Rated as a building, it is cottage-sized. 

You can find the big duck along a certain road side on Eastern Long Island, beside farmsteads selling vegetables, berries, jams, and fresh pies. When the Big Duck was first built it sold ducks. White ones with yellow bills of the variety known world-wide as Long Island duckling. Today they sell commemorative hats. 

The first critics to notice the big duck found it tasteless, commercial, gauche - at best kitsch. Then in 1977, 46 years after it was built, the Big Duck got its due, when a pair of Architectural historians wrote Learning from Las Vegas. Here the Big Duck was mentioned as the defining example of a new architectural genre. 

There is a famous painting of a pipe under which it is written (in French) “This is not a pipe.” By this the artist must have meant to say something like, this is not actually a pipe, but only a painting of a pipe. And in doing so, shown how we so often, and so casually, confuse the image and the illusion for the actual. 

In Learning from Las Vegas the authors invented a new word. The word was “Duck.” 

By Duck, they did not mean a feathered animal capable of flight with a bill; a buoyant bird. No, by Duck they were referring to the Big Duck and buildings like it. Buildings shaped like other things and, by their very existence serving as a sort of self-advertisement. Shoe stores shaped like shoes, immense donuts with doorways and windows and serving coffees. A music shop with an uncanny resemblance to a thirty foot tall Stradivarius. All ducks. It is actually what architects who have heard of the book call such buildings. 

Now, should someone raise the philosophical question, “Is the Big Duck a duck?” Try cab answer “yes.” 

Note: Before the invention of the word Duck, such thing-shaped buildings were officially known as “decorated sheds.” An especially disheartening phrase for such whimsical creations. 

Author Susan Van Scoy joined us to talk about this history of the Big Duck 

You can check out her book from the library 

and watch her talk: 

The Big Duck and Long Island Duck Farming