A LANDSCAPE
OF PERIL
& SEDUCTION
by Jay Wickersham faia
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be —
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
— Robert Frost
i found my first version of the coast as a young child, during
summers in the Cape Cod village of Woods Hole. My grandparents’ house
there was a late but handsome example of the Shingle Style, designed in
1934 by the New York firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the
Empire State Building. It had the long horizontal lines, capacious shady
porches, and commanding coastal views that exemplified the style.
But it was the beach that really introduced me to architecture and city
planning. With a few handfuls of sand, I could channel water into estuaries
and basins and canals, or transform water into land: quays and islands,
towered and walled, and populated by confused hermit crabs. Even at this
child-sized scale, the beach taught another lesson, which we should have
taken more seriously. At night the tide obliterated our work, sweeping the
sand clean for a new cycle of development and construction. Along the
coast, we should have learned, architecture’s claims for permanence are
always at risk.
Back then the dangers of the coast seemed remote, anomalous, unreal.
Each summer in Woods Hole I read and reread a book about the 1938
em
e
PREVIOUS PAGE Dungeness Spit, by Jesse Burke, 2011. Courtesy ClampArt, New York City.
hurricane. I would ask to hear stories about the storm:
how salt crusted the windows, how the neighbors’ front
door blew open and it took four men to push it shut.
It never really registered that a man and a woman had
drowned in the long house with blue shutters that
we drove past every day on our way into town. A
hurricane seemed a pleasurable, if slightly shivery,
natural spectacle.
Another unnerving summer pleasure was the
science-fiction novels of the English writer John
Wyndham. In The Kraken Wakes (in the US, Out of
the Deeps), published in 1953, aliens from Jupiter
fly their spaceships down into the deepest trenches of
the oceans, from which they emerge with amphibious
vehicles and grasping tentacles. When humans start
fighting back along the coasts, what do these worlddestroyers do? They figure out how to melt the polar
ice caps, triggering rising sea levels that drown every
coastal city around the world. Wyndham’s vision
of London’s flood barriers collapsing, of dark water
lapping around Manhattan’s blacked-out skyscrapers,
seemed more fiction than science.
Environmental science has transformed our view of
the coast and its allure. With the storms and sea-level
rise caused by climate change, we now understand that
this varied and beautiful landscape is a changeable and
often dangerous place to live and build. Instead of
architecture’s traditional claims for permanence, can
we imagine a coastal architecture that is lightweight,
movable, adaptable—as impermanent as the coast itself?
That we are currently in the process of reinventing
our understanding and use of the coast—harbor
barriers, reconstructed salt marshes, floodable
buildings, wind turbines—is in fact not all that new.
Just as the coastline itself is constantly being reshaped
by the ocean, so too are the ways we think about it
and use it. The notion of the coast as pleasure ground
(and prime real estate) is a relatively recent phenomenon:
In different ways, the Shingle Style, Coney Island, and
Miami Beach are some of its great exemplars.
Before that, the coast was a workplace. The
emblematic coastal building is the lighthouse; although
today its image has romantic connotations of beauty
and solitude, it was originally a utilitarian structure.
The sea was once a pasture for fish and a highway for
trade. Coastal forests were cut down for shipbuilding;
sheep cropped the hills to bare sand. New England
harbors, like the one in Woods Hole, stank of fish heads
and whale oil and guano factories that processed
cormorant droppings from the rocks. The coast offered
many different resources to exploit: It was an early
industrial zone.
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Hanging in my office I have a 1964 bird’s-eye map
of Manhattan Island, which shows a fleet of ocean
liners in the Hudson, sailing upstream or downstream
or moored at the piers. Manhattan was still a working
port. The cluster of Wall Street skyscrapers at its
southern tip looked out to sea, each one as improbable
and immense as the great lighthouse of ancient
Alexandria. But within a few years the liners had left;
the Hudson piers became parking lots and then parks;
the Fulton Fish Market moved to the South Bronx,
replaced by a shopping mall. In our cities too, the coast
as industrial workplace has given way to the coast as
developable real estate.
As we accept impermanence in our coastal
architecture, we also need to accept the dual nature
of the coast, as workplace as well as pleasure ground.
The coast is New England’s richest potential source
of renewable energy, where we can harvest the wind
and the tides. Now that the decade-long political
and legal battles over the proposed Cape Wind project
in Nantucket Sound have ended, the project is moving
into construction. Within a year or two the coastal
sea will start to be inhabited by benign metallic waterdwelling aliens, blindly turning to sniff out the sea
breeze. If the lighthouse was the old characteristic
structure of the coast as workplace, its new symbol
will likely be the wind turbine.
It’s easy to caricature battles over the future of
the coast, like the fight over Cape Wind, as struggles
between sound, science-based policy, and the vested
interests of money and power. But it’s not that simple.
The coast is also a landscape of peril and seduction.
As Robert Frost’s lines suggest, the coast is domesticity,
at the edge of a turbulent void. Workplace or pleasure
ground, wilderness or building lot—there are many
different versions of the coast, some shared and some
deeply personal.
When you walk along Commercial Street in
Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, you’ll notice that
many of the older shingled cottages wear a small blue
plaque with an iconogram of a house on top of a boat.
These structures were originally located at Long Point,
an exposed sand spit on the other side of the harbor.
Back in the 1840s, when Long Point’s inhabitants got
tired of battling storms, they picked up their houses,
loaded them on barges, and floated them to higher and
safer ground.
Architecture doesn’t have to conform to our
expectations about how to make buildings and what
to do with them over time. The coast insists that
we be creative. History may be dropping hints about
our future. ■
Pressley Associates
135/135 Lewis Wharf
Boston, MA
Landscape Architects
www.pressleyinc.com
617-725-0011
Winter 2013 3 7