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 France". 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 self-
explaining architectural elements in the form of the oversized allegorical sculpture group,
and in the ingenious way that the shapes, surfaces, steps, arches, ramps and passageways
inherent in the structure constitute a language that helps visitors orient themselves and find
their way through the building.