A drive through Connecticut along I-95 takes you past a parade of signage-bedecked strip malls, stucco-clad motels, and brightly lit gas stations—the American commercial vernacular, experienced, as intended, at 70 miles an hour. But among these decorated sheds is a duck, to borrow Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s term for a building formally distorted for symbolic effect. Marcel Breuer and Robert F. Gatje’s 1970 Armstrong Rubber Building stands just a few hundred feet from the highway in New Haven, its heavy concrete mass floating incongruously above an Ikea parking lot. Thick stilts leave a yawning vertical gap between a two-story base and a five-story block hanging above: building as sign, or, perhaps, sign as building. Either way you can’t miss it.
Photo courtesy Becker + Becker, click to enlarge.
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