Tagungsort Grand Hotel Heiligendamm

on the coast of California and this image is of
a pier across the bay from San Francisco. And
of course there are some delightful East Sea
piers. One of the great strengths of piers is
that architecturally and in engineering terms,
they vary so much.
Sometimes seaside architecture as an extreme
will include invented forms of architecture.
This is the pier in Nice, France, demolished in
the 1940s, and designed as an exotic ‘Oriental’
structure suggesting other parts of the world.
In Britain, the USA and in France, one of the
really strong motifs or architectural ideas is
ornamental or Oriental architecture. This is
the 1820s Royal Pavilion in Brighton, which
started the interest in Orientalism at the seaside
and was endlessly copied. It is an invented
Eastern style combining elements of Indian,
Oriental and Chinese architecture.
Another theme in seaside architecture has
been to use ideas of exotic other locations and
vegetation to make places seem to be somewhere
else and extraordinary different. Here
is a 1950s poster for the Cote de Azure with
architecture, with palm trees, sun and bikinis.
And this is a British version of the same thing.
And a cast iron palm tree on Coney Island in
New York City. The palm tree is one of those
ideas that you see endlessly repeated in northern
seaside places.
So, in summary, I would argue we need a
seaside architecture. I now want to turn to my
second theme, history, culture and nature.
This is an early picture of Scarborough, one
of the very early sea bathing places in Britain,
showing sea bathing taking place and early
bathing machines. And of course the nature
of the people who went to the seaside was
very limited. It was a very high class, leisured,
wealthy group of people using the seaside.
That was the 18th century. By the mid-19th
century a broader range of people were starting
to visit the seaside. This is Ramsgate on
the southeast coast of England. Ramsgate
Sands in the mid-19th century with a railway
station and a steam engine bringing people to
the seaside. People dressed not for the seaside
so much as for city life. And the West Pier in
Brighton on the south coast of England; again
piers. By the end of the 19th century, though,
that changes in Britain. Architecture is increasingly
used by a much broader mass of people.
This is Blackpool showing the North Pier and
its oriental architecture and then in the distance
the Blackpool Big Wheel and Tower. So
this is an architecture made of iron, glass and
wood for mass tourism. Class has changed at
the seaside. I think one of the challenges now
is how do seaside resorts target particular segments
of the population. Is the objective to
have a broad range of people coming to the
range? Apart from class, I think gender has
been a really important dimension of the seaside
and its architecture. This image is Margate,
southeast coast of England. A very early print
of, what in Britain we would describe using the
expression “dirty old men”, leering at naked
bathers. And that obsession with gender at the
seaside and how the seaside is portrayed has
continually evolved and developed. Publicity
for Margate from the interwar years and if you
count the number of young women and the
number of men, there is a disparity between
the two. There are many more young women
in this publicity poster than there are men.
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