The OddWay News
Case Study No. 2 · · 3 Min Read
A coffee pot in Bedford, a shoe in Hellam, a duck on Long Island, a soup can in Napoleon. They are all the same idea, they have a proper name, and the whole thing started with an elephant in 1881.
There is a proper term for a building shaped like the thing it sells: programmatic architecture, also called mimetic or, more dismissively, novelty architecture. It is a real category with a real history, and once you know it you cannot stop seeing it.
In 1881 a property speculator named James Lafferty built a six-storey tin-plated elephant on the sand at Margate, New Jersey. Lucy still stands. Her belly held his offices, and he took prospective buyers up into the howdah on her back so they could see the land he was selling.
That is the whole idea, fully formed, before anyone had a car: build something enormous and strange, and people will come to it, and while they are there you can sell them something.
The style properly took off in 1920s Los Angeles, and the reasons are specific. Cars became affordable to the middle class. The working week dropped to five days. Suddenly ordinary people were driving for pleasure, past businesses that now had to be noticed at speed.
A restaurant shaped like a hat opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1926 and was such a success it spawned something like seventy-five imitators in the region. There were buildings shaped like owls, tamales, whiskey barrels, dogs and oranges. People filed patents on them.
The heyday was roughly 1925 to 1934. After that the fashion moved to Streamline Moderne, where a building was styled to evoke a ship or an aeroplane rather than actually be one.
The Bedford Coffee Pot is textbook: eighteen feet of coffee pot built in 1927 to pull Lincoln Highway traffic into the service station next door.
The Haines Shoe House at Hellam is late — 1948 — and was built by a shoe magnate as a promotional guesthouse. Five floors, in the shape of a work boot.
The Big Duck at Flanders was built in 1931 by a duck farmer to sell ducks and duck eggs. It is on the National Register, and it gave architecture a word: critics use "duck" for any building whose whole form is its own sign.
Williamson's Coal House in West Virginia is the strangest of them, and the most local: an office built in 1933 out of sixty-five tons of coal, in a town that existed because of coal.
Because they are useless for anything else.
An ordinary commercial building gets renovated over the top of itself until the original is invisible. A building shaped like a coffee pot cannot become anything but a coffee pot — so it is either preserved or demolished, and enough communities have chosen preservation that a surprising number are still here.
The Bedford Coffee Pot was going to be knocked down. It was moved to the fairgrounds instead and restored in 2004.
Whether the building is the object, or merely has the object on top of it.
Programmatic architecture proper means the structure itself is the shape. After the war, fibreglass and aluminium made enormous separate sculptures cheap, and most of what came later is a normal shed with a giant thing beside it.
Both are worth stopping for. Only one of them is the real article.
