Architecture parlante (French: ) 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". Nonce orders Within more practical applications, nonce orders, invented under the impetus of Neoclassicism, have served as examples of architecture parlante. Several orders, usually simply based upon the Composite order and only varying in the design of the capitals, have been invented under the inspiration of specific occasions, but have not been used again. Thus, they may be termed "nonce orders" on the analogy of nonce words. In 1762, James Adam invented a British order featuring the heraldic lion and unicorn. In 1789, George Dance invented the Ammonite order, a variant of Ionic substituting volutes in the form of fossil ammonites for Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, London. In the United States, Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the Capitol Building in Washington DC, designed a series of American orders. Most famous is the order substituting corncobs and their husks, which was executed by Giuseppe Franzoni and installed in a vestibule of the Capitol Building. Beaux-Arts The same concept, in the somewhat more restrained form of allegorical sculpture and inscriptions, became one of the hallmarks of Beaux-Arts structures, and thereby filtered through to American civic architecture. One fine example is the 1901 New York Yacht Club building on 44th Street in Manhattan, designed by the team of Warren and Wetmore. Its three front windows are patterned on the sterns of early Dutch ships, and the façade fairly drips with nautical-themed applied sculpture. The same team designed the 1912 Grand Central Terminal, which also contains self-explaining architectural elements in the form of the oversized allegorical sculpture group, and in the ingenious way that the shapes, surfaces, steps, arches, ramps and passageways inherent in the structure constitute a language that helps visitors orient themselves and find their way through the building. The same year, McKim, Mead & White designed the Farley Post Office Building with its famous inscription adapted from Herodotus: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." The civic architecture