Original storyboard for the opening of Batman: The Animated series by Bruce Timm
MidCentury Modern Jersey Shore
Ebb Tide by Tyler Haughey focuses on the Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns situated on a five-mile-long barrier island along the southern New Jersey coastline, and home to one of the most important architectural collections of the 20th century. They contain a trove of midcentury modern motels that make up the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the United States. These motels remain fully functioning and virtually unchanged since their original construction, in many cases over fifty years ago.
Adopting a spare aesthetic and using contemporary materials such as poured concrete and glass, the motels brought European high modernism to America’s middle class. Applying the idea of the “decorated shed”, a term coined by renowned postmodern architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour in their seminal 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, each motel relies on unique architectural features and symbolic ornament to form its own identity and set itself apart from the others nearby. Infused with space-age optimism and experimentation, and utilizing the iconography of faraway, exotic destinations, these structures represent the way America’s middle class traveled and vacationed during the postwar era.
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“ I met a group of teenagers called the Jokers. I was 25 and they were about 16. I could easily have been taken for one of them. In time they allowed me to witness their fear, depression and anger. I soon realized that I, too, was feeling their pain. In staying close to them, I uncovered my own feelings of failure, frustration and rage.”
Bruce Davidson, The Brooklyn Gang, 1959
Sky Erickson, ROAM Magazine
www.skyerickson.com
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Going Underground, Bob Mazzer
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