Parlante Architecture 532a13

PARLANTE ARCHITECTURE

INTRODUCTION The phrase architecture parlante (“speaking architecture”) refers to the concept of buildings that explain their own function or identity. The phrase was originally associated with Claude Nicolas Ledoux, and was extended to other Paris-trained architects of the Revolutionary period, Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu. Emil Kaufmann traced its first use to an anonymous critical essay with Ledoux's work as the subject, written for Magasin Pittoresque in 1852, and entitled "Etudes d'architecture en ". In Ledoux's unbuilt plans for the salt-producing town of Chaux, the hoop-makers' houses are shaped like barrels, the river inspector's house straddles the river, and an enormous brothel takes the shape of an erect phallus. Architecture parlante reached its height during the Beaux-Arts and Art Deco periods. Following World War II this approach to architecture became entirely devalued and was absent from nearly all new architecture, like all ornamentation was during that period. The idea became revived somewhat during the rise of postmodern architecture during the 1980s, but it is still quite rare among new buildings. Programmatic architecture (also known as mimetic or novelty architecture), which mostly began in the 1920s, also sometimes uses architecture parlante, but instead of the ornament reflecting the function, the entire building is shaped to look like something related to its usage. However, novelty architecture is also very rare. Within more practical applications, nonce orders, invented under the impetus of Neoclassicism, have served as examples of architecture parlante. Several orders, usually simply based upon the composite order and only varying in the design of the capitals, have been invented under the inspiration of specific occasions, but have not been used again. Thus they may be termed "Nonce Orders" on the analogy of nonce words. The same concept, in the somewhat more restrained form of allegorical sculpture and inscriptions, became one of the hallmarks of “Beaux-Arts” structures, and thereby filtered through to American civic architecture. One fine example is the 1901 New York Yacht Club building on 44th Street in Manhattan, designed by the team of Warren and Wetmore. Its three front windows are patterned on the sterns of early Dutch ships, and the façade fairly drips with nautical-themed applied sculpture. It also contains selfexplaining architectural elements in the form of the oversized allegorical sculpture group, and in the ingenious way that the shapes, surfaces, steps, arches, ramps and ageways inherent in the structure constitute a language that helps visitors orient themselves and find their way through the building.