The Big Chicken, an Atlanta landmark. Yes, the eyes and beak move.
Sometimes the easiest way to tell what a store sells is by looking at the shape of the store itself. Like a library shaped like a stack of books or a Burger Shack that's a giant burger,
Shaped Like What It Sells is a building that is modeled and designed to look like the product(s) that's inside of it. According to
The Field Guide to Sprawl, in
Real Life, the name for this type of a building is a "duck," after a duck-shaped duckling stand.
Should a giant entity mistake it for the real deal,
This Billboard Needs Some Salt will likely ensue.
A Subtrope of
Bizarchitecture. Not to be confused with
Shaped Like Itself. Compare with
Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
Examples:
Comic Books
Live-Action Television
- The Pie Hole of Pushing Daisies is shaped like a giant pie.
- There was a joke along these lines in one episode of How I Met Your Mother. Ted was designing a building shaped like a 10-gallon hat for some cheesy Texan Rib-joint franchise. Instead, they went with a Mecha-Godzilla shaped building (wearing a cowboy hat). No businessman is going to have a building design that needlessly complex if he's not going to sell souvenirs inside...unless, of course, he's been charmed by the powers of Sven.
- Arrested Development: The Bluths' one consistent moneymaker is the frozen banana stand, which is shaped like a banana.
- The Brady Bunch: A client, Beebee Gallini, freaks Mike out when she asks him to design her makeup factory first in the shape of a powder puff, then a lipstick, and finally a compact, complete with hinged roof.
- Clarissa Explains It All: Marshall Darling is an architect who seems to specialize in these.
- My Name Is Earl: Pop's Hot Dog Cart
◊ in "Stole P's HD Cart."
Western Animation
- The balcony of the pizzeria from Teen Titans is shaped like a slice of pizza when seen from above. The floor is the cheese and the tables are the pepperoni.
- In Pinocchio some of the buildings in Pleasure Island, including a smoking house shaped like a pipe and a pool hall in the form of an eight-ball.
- Used in CatDog, in the case of bodily parts.
- As well as food, such as Taco Depot.
- SpongeBob SquarePants has a few:
- Glove World is made of many different buildings shaped like gloves.
- The Chum Bucket is in the shape of a giant bucket.
- Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius has McSpankey's Burgers, shaped like a giant burger (though it also has a giant Scotsman's head on the side).
Video Games
- Rollercoaster Tycoon has several:
- A lemonade stand shaped like a lemon.
- A burger stand shaped like a cheeseburger.
- Almost every concession stand has an option to be shaped like the things it sells.
- Theme Park has the Coffee Shop, Pokey Cola, Big Time Fries and the Big Time Burger shops.
- Banjo-Tooie has Big Al's Burgers and Salty Joe's Fries, a hamburger stand and french fry stand shaped like their respective products.
Web Original
- The main shops of NeoPets are themed like this: The food shop is a hamburger, the book shop is a book, the auction house is a mallet, the post office is a postal parcel, the pizza shop is a pizza, the school supply shop is a pencil, the music shop is a tuba of sorts, health food shop is broccoli, the defence item shop is a helmet, the gift shop is a gift box, the bakery is a peppercake house, the collectible card shop is a cardhouse, the hot dog shop is a hot dog, and the chocolate factory has chocolate topping.
Real Life
- The patio walk-up to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is shaped like a giant record player. And the round element on stilts (to the left in the referenced photo) is intended to evoke a drum.
- The Oscar Mayer Wiener-Mobile is shaped like a giant wiener.
- The headquarters of the Longaberger basket company is shaped like a giant basket◊.
- Tail o' the Pup in Los Angeles. This wiki breaks on URLs with apostrophes in them, so you'll just have to Google it.
- Here's a music building.
- There's a fauna museum in Indonesia with a small reptilian zoo, in the shape of a giant komodo dragon◊.
