Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1streetscape or the appearance of (more or less) public spatialensembles.- Thirdly, in what way changes in supplementary systems reflectchanges in activities, user groups, and intensities of use, related tofor instance changes in function, role, image and “meaning”.In studies of iconographic flexibility and iconographic transformation relatedto change in activities, users, function and role of urban areas, the oftenquoted distinction between “ducks” and “decorated sheds” – betweenbuildings as symbols and buildings with applied symbols – is useful. 237For buildings that are designed as symbols, the architecture of thebuilding – its shape, spatial organization, and its materials – are supposed tocommunicate to the public the function, the meaning, or the symbolic weightof the program that the building accommodates. Buildings designed toaccommodate major, monumental public (or private) programs are oftendesigned as symbols. Most specialized building typologies have a touch of“duck”, making us recognize their function and meaning (schools lookinglike typical schools, churches looking like typical churches, fire stationslooking like typical fire stations, mosques looking like typical mosques, etc.).Pure ducks are rarer. According to Venturi et al. “ducks” are in general usedas a negative underpinning of the buildings’ lack of flexibility towardsadapting other programs than what they initially were designed for. Butsometimes, programmatic and symbolic flexibility is not necessarilyprioritized. Examples of celebrated “pure ducks” is for instance theBibliotheca Alexandria 238 or the new Opera house in Oslo, both designed bythe architect office Snøhetta. Ducks are usually not so easily transformed toaccommodate new programs. Buildings that are designed as symbols aredesigned to be semantically weighted elements, but this does not necessarilymean that they work as such. Architects may design buildings as symbolseven if the buildings are not supposed to accommodate a major publicprogram. Sometimes architects with an urge for expression design a duck fora minor building task – such as a private home, a shop or a storage building.This does not make the building a semantically weighted element, but ratheran irregularity in the architectural system: Most of us have experiencedcurious expectations related to observing, in the middle of a homogenous237 This distinction was first introduced in Robert Venturi et al.’s study of the Las Vegas strip (1972/1996), as adistinction between architectural prototypes for communication of meaning: The “Duck” refers to the buildingitself as a symbol, exemplified by the Long Island Big Duck, Flanders, New York (a roadside chicken/duckbarbeque restaurant, formed like a huge white duck). The “Decorated Shed” refers to the building as a genericloft in which its aesthetic characteristics derives from its applied signs and/or decorative or iconographicsurfaces.238 The architect office Snøhetta’s Bibliotheca Alexandria has a circular tilted form rising from the ground toreveal massive stone walls with alphabetic inscriptions. From the air the form can give associations to a hugedata-chip, as a deliberate comment to the function of a contemporary library: to store data.124