UGLY AND ORDINARY ARCHITECTECTURE (130)
textures, and colors, carefully composed (Fig. 115). The total image of our U&O fire house an implying civic character as specific use comes from the conventions of roadside architecture that it follows; from the decorated false facade, from the banality though familiarity of the standard aluminum sash and roll-up doors, and from the conspicuous sign that identifies it through spelling, the most denotative of symbols: FIRE STATION NO.4 (Fig. 116). These elements act as symbols as well as expressive architectural abstractions. They are not merely ordinary but represent ordinariness symbolically and stylistically; they arc enriching as well, because they add a layer of literary meaning.
Richness can come from conventional architecture. For 300 years European architecture was variations on a Classical norm a rich conformity. But it can also come through an adjusting of the scale or context of familiar and conventional elements to produce unusual meanings. Pop artists used unusual juxtapositions of everyday objects in tense and vivid plays between old and new associations to flout the everyday interdependence of context and meaning, giving us a new interpretation of twentieth-century cultural artifacts. The familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power.
The double-hung window in Guild House is familiar in form but unusually large in size and horizontal in proportion, like the big, distorted Campbell Soup can in Andy Warhol's painting. This typical window is also juxtaposed with a smaller window of the same and proportion. The exact location of the bigger window on a parallel plane behind the smaller window tends to disturb the habitual perception of distance through perspective; the resultant symbolic and optical tensions are, we maintain, a means of making boring architecture interesting a more valid means than the irrelevant articulations of today's strident but boring minimegastructures (Fig. 117).
AGAINST DUCKS, OR UGLY AND ORDINARY OVER HEROIC
AND ORIGINAL, OR THINK LITTLE
We should not emphasize the ironic richness of banality in today's artistic context at expense of discussing the appropriateness and inevitability of U&O architecture on a wider basis. Why do we uphold the symbolism of the or the ordinary via the decorated shed over the symbolism of the heroic via the sculptural duck? Because this is not the time and ours is not the environment for heroic communication through pure architecture. Each medium has its day, and the rhetorical environmental statements of our time civic, commercial, or residential will come from media more purely symbolic, perhaps less static and more adapt