Learning from the Wreck: Reframing Sentimentality

Abstract

Cape Cod is characterized by a cyclical churning of land. Over timescales of decades, the Atlantic shifts, erodes, and redeposits the sandy sediment from which the Cape is almost entirely composed, rapidly reshaping its coastal profile. Those who have made their homes and livelihoods on it have learned to live with the instability generated by these fluctuations of the dunes. The Cape’s outermost stretch of beach is a zone in which the stability of our infrastructure, be it the hulls of our ships or the foundations and walls of our homes, is tenuous. Its shores have been dotted with countless wrecks over the years. Its dunes have seen many beachfront houses crumble down their steep faces. Yet we persist in inhabiting this zone of precarity. As described by authors like Henry David Thoreau, the draw to this liminal space between land and sea is rooted in strong human sentimentality and a fascination with the overwhelming sublimity of the sea’s vastness. This sentimentality, our ability to learn from the systemic failures of our infrastructure, and indeed a literal repurposing of cyclically reclaimed building material from housing and shipping results in a new architecture uniquely suited to meeting an important housing need for the region. It relieves pressure from the Cape’s broader housing stock by proposing new housing to accommodate researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This new architecture may itself be ephemeral but acknowledges itself as simply one point in the very cycles of destruction and reuse that generated it.