It’s 5pm and people are packing up their bags, putting on
their shoes and tugging over-stimulated little ones away from the shoreline
after a fun day at the beach. Noise
follows them down the ramp and out as they walk west straight into the sun. The
visitors leave and a tangible sense of emptiness remains as the staff tidies
the skew chairs and tables.
I have a unique perspective on this familiar summer scene:
from the 4th floor of the National Building Museum I can look down
on The Beach. I appreciate that even the sun cooperates in this surreal
fiction, this constructed metaphor, that has taken over two thirds of the
Museum’s Great Hall. There are few things as entertaining as humans at play,
whether in a city or at a metaphorical beach, and I will get this view all
summer until Labor Day.
Last summer when we had The BIG MAZE I didn’t gaze down at
it, as clever and lovely as it was, and long for a chance to be in it in the
early morning or after hours when everyone was gone. I do, however, find myself feeling that way
about The Beach, the simultaneously serene and comical installation designed by
Snarkitecture for the Museum this summer.
The metaphor works, right down to the mirror at the horizon. The joy of a metaphor is in teetering on the
ridge between is and is not. This is/is not a beach. It’s a Beach. A “beach.” It’s only been open since July 1, but already
the sustain pedal of metaphor is pressed to the floor: people sit at the shoreline or on the pier with
just their feet “in”; they say “let’s go in” or “it’s time to come out.” The
sound of the balls is eerily close to the sound of waves. We are deeply attracted to edges, especially the
water’s edge, where we either hesitate in fear or jump in.
There’s humor in it of course—it’s wildly hilarious fun in
there-- but beneath is a current of contemplation and, if you let your mind go
there, provocation. We are charmed by this
pale translucent ocean of plastic but should be sobered by the thought of real
plastic in the real ocean. We are
reassured by the fact that this ocean is only waist deep, but can feel a little
terror of metaphorical drowning. Just outside of the Beach the exhibition Designing for Disaster shows us the real
thing, and it’s neither charming nor reassuring.
 | |
| Beistegui roof terrace, 1930 |
There’s a nest of spatial reversals at play, where outsides
are in and insides out. I’ve always been
fascinated by places that play with those relationships—orangeries, like the
one at Dumbarton Oaks, where living nature entwines the architecture; botanical
gardens, where entire ecosystems are stuffed into glass; the surreal living Le
Corbusier did in 1930 at the Beistegui Apartment in Paris. The Beach is an outside that’s inside a box
inside a cavernous architectural space that feels like outside.
