October 23, 2003
seaside dwelling
I took a walk along the beach front early this morning with the poodles. As there were few people around at 6am I had time to look at the beach architecture.
Many of the 1940s shacks on the esplanade facing Encounter Bay along the southern coast of the Fleurieu Pensinsula in South Australia are being modernized or pulled down and replaced by the glassy modern. Economics is driving the transformation of the beach house as property prices have skyrocketed. They cost a cool million plus and they stand empty for approximately 46 weeks of the year.
The new beach house style reminds of Le Corbusier's Savoya Villa without the silts.
Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, 1929-30.
I should emphasis 'reminds'. 'Reminds' refers to the purity of Le Corbusier's machines for living. The new beachside holiday homes are more of a rectangular box, rather than layered with larger rectangle above a smaller one. And they have lots more glass. 'Reminds' also refers to a cold and ascetic architecture with its hard surfaces and plethora of technological devices.
The new beach villas along the coast from Victor Harbour to Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island all look the same. Their coolness involves a rejection of the old secluded and private interior dwelling of a haven in a heartless world. They are designed as living in an airconditioned glass house---all inside is on show in a transit space for those cruising past on the outside. We want you to look and admire us the design says.
The show of style and wealth of the transitory nomads is what is important. The transparency and openness of the display of wealth is seen as "avant garde." the architecture says we are modern, stylish and wealthy whilst the interior on display says we live the dream of being a success. The nomads in the transit lounge only see the dream as they live their life of hurried contemporaneity.
The new beachside holiday homes strike me as empty shells where life behind the glassy facade is much hollowed out. Then, maybe, this architectural beach form is appropriate to the poverty of experience in late modernity, which results from a hurried, machine-like processing of information, the destruction of tradition, and the lack of collective form of life. Transience and instability are the new conditions of life.
In the denatured city my experience is a series of sensations caused by disconnected isolated moments that are not related to one another. These sensations are not integrated into a stock of experience. The stock of experience is but dimly remembered as a mode of inhabituation.
Living in the beach glasshouse. An expression of postmodern life? It was not so long ago that the modest beach houses of yesteryear---the shacks---were overflowing with carefree family life full of fantasy, play and sharing. That holiday mode of dwelling stood in opposition to the rationalised public world (the market+politics) of instrumental reason.
Should we not mourn what is passing?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 23, 2003 12:56 PM | TrackBack"They cost a cool million plus and they stand empty for approximately 46 weeks of the year."
I noticed this at Apollo Bay - huge homes sitting empty for most of the year. There has been such a cultural shift in a generation about the expectations of a holdiday house - from shack to villa. Owners who put their homes on the rental market can tell you that they have to meet certain requirements of mod cons that not so long ago would have been regarded as "holiday" luxury class.
Huge empty homes enjoying sea views hardly ever seen- something very wrong here.
It is a big shift in seaside dwelling isn't it. I'm not sure that we understand what it means.
Maybe Bataille can offer us something of an insight.
There are many of these houses all along the coast from Pt. McDonnell through to Geelong.
Posted by: dj on October 24, 2003 02:50 PMEmpty shells for empty shells.
Should we not mourn what is passing?
Yes!
that means we mourn who we once were.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on October 24, 2003 09:14 PMindeed
Posted by: saint on October 25, 2003 02:01 AM