Architecture parlante (“speaking architecture”) is architecture that explains its 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.
Read more about Architecture Parlante: Nonce Orders, Beaux-Arts, Neo-Classical, Modernism
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“In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit—if totally different in form—from all the romantic architecture of the past.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)