Relocations

Locations where the Big Duck has been: (1) Riverhead, (2) Flanders, (3) Sears Bellows Park

The building was originally constructed in 1931 on West Main Street (New York State Route 25) in the Upper Mills section of Riverhead.^[14][15] In 1937, Maurer had the building lifted from its foundation and relocated to his new duck ranch in Flanders, four miles (6.4 km) away.^[1]: 3

The Big Duck closed as a store in 1984. Four years later, the Suffolk County Department of Parks and Recreation acquired the building, moved it to Sears Bellows County Park between Flanders and Hampton Bays, and repurposed it as a gift shop operated by the Friends for Long Island Heritage.^{[1]: 4 [16]} The Department of Parks publicized the move with a "Lost My Nest" sign soliciting donations; keeping with the mimetic theme, it was shaped like a giant suitcase with a handle on top.^[17]

In 2004, a proposal was made to move the Big Duck to Long Island MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, with the move estimated to cost at least $60,000 (equivalent to $95,000 in 2024). Proponents suggested this would increase the number of visitors and help publicize the airport's new terminal building^[18] but the move never happened and the building was returned to its 1937 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 (equivalent to $73,000 in 2024) to prepare the route.^[3] The current location of the building is accessible from the Long Island Rail Road via the Riverhead station.^[19]

Architecture

Images from God's Own Junkyard

Marion Post Wolcott, 1938

John Vachon, 1939

Peter Blake, the managing editor of Architectural Forum, was one of the first to criticize the Big Duck, offering a pessimistic view of the building and the commercialism it represented in his 1964 book God's Own Junkyard.^[1]: 3 In the preface, he wrote that his book was "a deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain"^[24] and Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her New York Times book review that it decried the "babel of billboards" and automobile-focused Googie architecture.^[25] Blake was familiar with the building from summers he had spent in the nearby Hamptons;^[26] he presented his own photo of it opposite those by Marion Post Wolcott and John Vachon showing idyllic scenes of families with small children playing among ducks at the edge of a pond.^[24]

Architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote about ducks in a 1971 Architectural Forum article, stating that modernist architects had ceased to apply ornamentation to their designs and were instead making the buildings themselves the ornamentation: "In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament they distorted the whole building into a duck." They urged their peers to heed the advice of 19th-century architect Augustus Pugin that it was "all right to decorate construction but never to construct decoration".^[27]

More famously, Venturi and Scott Brown wrote about the disparity between highway signs that advertise businesses and the buildings that house those businesses in their 1977 book, Learning from Las Vegas. Using U.S. Route 66 as an example, they observed that the signs are large, vulgar, and consume a disparate portion of the business's budget. The buildings on the other hand are smaller, more modest, and cheap. They contrasted this with the Big Duck – which they referred to as "The Long Island Duckling" – calling it a "sculptural symbol and architectural shelter", noting that "Sometimes the building is the sign."^[28]: 13 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".^{[28]: 87–89} Seven years after Las Vegas, Howard Mansfield wrote that the book had resulted in the duck becoming a "popular character actor", working its way into the academic vernacular and appearing frequently in journals such as Architectural Forum. Huxtable referred to ducks often in her reviews, to describe "buildings straining after symbolism when there is nothing to symbolize."^[9]

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 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". He said the Big Duck ignores the modernist axiom that form follows function and posited the alternative Duck Design Theory, that "form follows fantasy".^[29][30]

Architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy argued in American Autopia that the Big Duck's immortality came not from Blake's original inclusion as one photo out of more than a hundred, but from Venturi and Scott Brown's "appropriation" of the building in their own book. She credited Learning from Las Vegas with inspiring roadside photographer John Margolies to make his own image of the building and leading to its inclusion on the National Register.^[26] In another historical treatment, Luis Miguel Lus Arana and Gabriele Neri also ascribed the Big Duck's fame to Venturi, adding that the building possesses a "proud obliviousness to its own tackiness".^[31] Journalist Phil Patton presented a different view in The All-American Roadside. He argued that the Big Duck's path to notoriety had to do not so much with its form, but was rather an accident of its location that exposed it to New York's architectural and artistic powers. In addition to being near Peter Blake's summer home, it was not far from the house of well-known artist Jackson Pollock.^[32][33]

Architecture professor Caroline O'Donnell used the Big Duck as an example of architecture parlante in her 2015 book Niche Topics. She defined the term, coined in 1852, as "an expression of programmatic meaning through form in a humorous and sometimes provocative way". The fact that the building looked funny was a key differentiator between being merely a decorated shed versus being a duck.^[34] Humanities professor Margaret Grubiak examined the Ark Encounter Christian theme park in her 2020 treatment of religious architecture, Monumental Jesus. She described the park's full-scale recreation of Noah's Ark as "an architectural paradox of sculpture and building" and compared it to the Big Duck for the literalist advertising function they both perform.^[35]

Information design

The information scientist and statistician Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information uses the term duck in a different context, saying it is explicitly named after the Big Duck to describe irrelevant decorative elements in information design:^[36]

When a graphic is taken over by decorative forms or computer debris, when the data measures and structures become Design Elements, when the overall design purveys Graphical Style rather than quantitative information, then the graphic may be called a duck in honor of the duck-form store, "Big Duck." For this building the whole structure is itself decoration, just as in the duck data graphic.

Tufte describes ducks as "flamboyant" and "marginally useful", lumping them into the larger category of "chartjunk".^[37]