Big Duck

fWotD Episode 3380: Big Duck Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.The featured article for Thursday, 6 August 2026, is Big Duck.The Big Duck is a 20-foot-tall (6.1 m) ferrocement building in the shape of a duck: a canonical example of novelty architecture. Built in 1931 in Riverhead, New York, United States, it was moved several times to various locations on eastern Long Island, ending up in Flanders in 2007. Well-known for its distinctive appearance, this structure inspired the word duck as a common term in academic literature used to refer to buildings shaped like everyday objects or describe excessive ornamentation used in graphical presentations of data.The Big Duck was built in 1931 by duck farmer Martin Maurer for use as a shop to sell ducks and duck eggs. This was during a period when duck farming was a growing industry on eastern Long Island and novelty architecture was on the rise due to the increasing popularity of automobiles. The building attracted both widespread academic criticism and public acclaim. It was added to both the National Register of Historic Places and the New York State Register of Historic Places in 1997 and is a principal building on the Big Duck Ranch, which was listed on both registers in 2008.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:23 UTC on Thursday, 6 August 2026.For the full current version of the article, see Big Duck on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @[email protected] check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Arthur.