In the course of developing Guild House, an elderly housing project completed in 1963, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown proposed that the destiny of modern architecture was not to build heroic monuments but to produce 'ugly and ordinary' structures. Observing that clients, uninterested in aesthetics, would inevitably put ill-suited signs on buildings, the architects chose to strike preemptively and add their own sign to announc the structure's name. Atop the building they mounted a non-functioning, gold anodized antenna to mark the building's common room and to signify that old people like to watch a lot of TV. Seen by both critics and occupants as a cynical joke at the expense of the inhabitants, the antenna was later removed.

As signage could be replaced at any time should the building's function change, Venturi and Scott Brown believed this gave new flexibility to structures, fulfilling the modernist demand for a universal space and coined the term 'the decorated shed' to refer to this approach. Although Guild House is held by many to be a key building in the evolution of postmodernism, the idea of the decorated shed proved too controversial for even the most avant-garde architects and Venturi and Scott Brown were virtually ostracized from the profession.