An Urbiphile at the Beach

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 4^th 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. 

The Beach is intentionally, relentlessly artificial, but our emotions and reactions are real, as if we are in an immersive replay of the film Ex Machina.  Am I over-thinking this? Well, that is in my nature, but these thoughts are immanent in the work, available to anyone who takes time to see past the surface spectacle and disarming kid-friendly playground quality.  So, come on in, the water’s great…