Housing Pressure Hits Discovery Park

Here's what we found at Discovery Park's North Beach on Sunday. You can't see it in the photo, but there's probably a dozen or more of these structures that go all the way down the beach, even extending into the part you can't get to at high tide unless you're willing to get wet.

Stacking rocks on the beach says "I recognize this natural setting and contrast it with a small display of unnatural order." Building tee-pees and lean-tos of driftwood up and down the beach says "I'm a megalomaniacal asshole (or a teenager) with too much access to drugs and time and no sense of context (or a teenager)."

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By Dan in Arts & Events, Miscellaneous on June 12, 2007 10:59 AM

Comments [rss]

Seattlest Tom

They make nice shelters for lounging out on the beach and having a picnic without getting baked by the summer sun or having your stuff strewn by the wind. The Hot Research Associate and I used one for exactly those things last year.

Dan

There'll be no fun on any beaches in Seattle on my watch!

>God, talk about pretension.

No, you're right. i don't know. I was annoyed by them for some reason.

Duncan

I'm gonna have to side with #1 here. Beaches aren't art museums, and my guess is that these lean-tos weren't created by "megalomaniacal" folks looking to build installation art. Rather, they were built by people having fun at the park.

You, know, fun?

God, talk about pretension.

Dan

If you're going to take over a parking lot or something for an art installation, fine. If you're going to use Discovery Park's beach for your canvas, though, your art better be really fucking cool because the natural setting that you're destroying in the process was pretty cool to begin with. It's like coming down to the beach and seeing the bluffs and the driftwood and the rocks and saying, you know what, I can improve on this. And you can't, or whomever built these can't, anyway.