The picture above is Lucy, an elephant-shaped building in Margate, New Jersey, near Atlantic City. Lucy is one of the few truly odd attractions from the early days of American seaside amusement parks to survive until now, and achieved a second fame over a century after construction. The important, and mildly unbelievable stats: constructed in 1881, 65 feet high and 60 feet long, with one full floor level inside and two partial floors. Here’s a side elevation showing the location of the interior wooden trusses:
And a plan showing the interior stairs:
James Lafferty had a patent on animal-shaped buildings as well as, possibly, a compulsion regarding them: Lucy had a younger and much larger sibling in Coney Island: the Elephant Colossus. Here’s an illustration from 1885, the summer that the Colossus opened for business:
If those pictures look like exaggerations, they’re not. The Colossus was over 120 feet tall, or approximately twelve stories high. Like so many of the other wood-built attractions at Coney, the elephant burned down, after eleven years.
In the end, Lucy is a building shaped like an elephant, nothing more. However, the bizarre nature of her appearance and her prominent location facing the ocean in a resort town have made her famous. Obviously there is no reason that a building should be shaped like an elephant, and doing so creates problems for both waterproofing and use. On the other hand, there’s no reason a building should be shaped like a Roman temple or a gothic church and we don’t usually questions why people built them; and quite a few buildings suffer from problems with waterproofing and usability. In terms of structural engineering, putting a building up on legs is a challenge, but at Lucy’s relatively small scale, it can be done even with wood framing.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, in Learning From Las Vegas, came to the conclusion that the aesthetics of buildings can be divided into two categories: decorated sheds and ducks. A decorated shed is a building in which ornament is applied to a plain building, adding aesthetics to what would have been built if no one was thinking about aesthetics. The craze for Roman-temple banks in the U.S. in the 1890s created a lot of buildings that are basically rectangular prisms but have a lot of columns, and acanthus leaves, and acroteria, and cornices, and water tables, and other pigeon-landings bolted on.
A duck, on the other hand, is a building where the overall design cannot be separated from the aesthetics – where the aesthetics are integral. The name comes from the Long Island Duck. The Duck is a fairly simple one-story building, and I’d argue that Lucy is more of a duck than the Duck is. Lucy’s structure was far more complex that it needed to be for no reason other than to imitate an elephant’s legs. The Duck has the edge that ducks are long-time residents of Long Island, while the connection of elephants to the Atlantic City area is, to my knowledge, limited to circuses.
Ultimately, the problem with a shed-versus-duck analysis is that few non-professional observers have any reason to care what the conclusion is. Lucy is almost 140 years old, which suggests that a lack of useful purpose, some waterproofing problems, and being famous for being famous are not such a big deal. I’m a fan of useful buildings – not a surprise in an engineer, I guess – so I wouldn’t tell anyone to go build an elephant-shaped house. On the other hand, I will defend Lucy against all criticism.
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