EBB TIDE
Photographer Tyler Haughey shows us a series of photographs of motels in the Wildwoods. An exhibition that’s as present today as it was in the past.
The Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns located on a five-mile-long barrier island on the southern New Jersey coast, are home to one of the most important architectural collections of the 20th century. They contain a trove of mid- century 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 drawing on the iconography of faraway exotic destinations, these structures represent the way America’s middle class travelled and holidayed during the postwar era.
Built to cater for the annual influx of summer tourists vacationing in the area in the mid- 1950s, the motels have always faced a steep decline in visitors during the remainder of the year, leaving most with no choice but to close for the off-season. Normally vibrant and full of life, they sit shuttered and vacant for nine months every year, unoccupied time capsules of summers past.
Their brightly-coloured facades, futurist details and exuberant neon signage are in stark contrast to the eerie, unpopulated emptiness of the winter months, transforming these beach towns into real-life abandoned film sets.
R: Gori Vicens