Eastbourne Borough Beach Hut
Toronto
“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
-John Green, Paper Towns
This beach hut is an exercise in the ordinary. It is really, not very much different than any old beach hut in form and material. It is constructed with rough sawn wood slats on a wood frame. And like an old beach hut, with gaps occurring between its weather beaten cladding, this beach hut lets the sunlight stream through its wood slat cladding; only here amplified with the use of polished acrylic strips.
During the day, while the view of the hut from the outside is quite normal, the experience of the interior is extra-ordinary; bright vertical lines of streaming sunlight animate the black interior.
At night, the experience is reverse. The interior’s artificial light leaks through the gaps and the phantom image of the hut is defined in the night’s darkness. Evident as well are the shadowy interruptions of bodies moving in the hut.
Here, architecture is a playful investigation; an attempt to comprehend the ordinary differently; to change perspective.
As Georges Bataille once said, “We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”
Credits
Weiss Architecture and Urbanism
Kevin Weiss – Principal, Sophie Tremblay, Mina Hanna
