Study 180: The Decorated Shed Has Nothing Behind It: Two Fifth Avenue Scaffolds and the Refusal to Be Absent

On two blocks of Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton and Prada have turned construction scaffolding into the most legible architecture on the street. Louis Vuitton's covers a building being demolished; the sign is applied to an absence. This study reads both against Venturi and Scott Brown's decorated shed, and finds the term inverted: the shed no longer decorates a building, it replaces one. It also finds that the two scaffolds are not equivalent. The trunk stack is legible instantly and at distance and has been photographed accordingly; the Prada scrim is a genuine material experiment that only reso