The Hub: National Centre for Craft & Design presents
Bathing Beauties: A World Premiere
‘Re- imagining the Beach Hut for the 21st Century’
An international exhibition of over one hundred models designed by artists and architects, which re-imagine the British beachhut for the first time in three hundred years. The exhibition launches especially for Architecture Week (15 – 24 June) 2007

Fri 15 June – Sun 2 Sept 2007
The Hub: National Centre for Craft & Design, Sleaford, Lincolnshire.
The Bathing Beauties exhibition evolved from the Bathing Beauties project which inspired 240 architects, artists and designers from 15 countries to compete for commissions to build their designs on the stunning Lincolnshire coast. The competition, organised by lead artist Michael Trainor, elicited one of the most exciting responses to any architectural competition this century. One hundred selected models (scale 1:15), showing the incredible virtuosity of approach will be on show.

‘The Beach Hut is one of the few building forms which has been seriously overlooked by contemporary architects the world over. They are perceived as a treasured feature of our coastal landscape, as quintessentially British as fish and chips and the knotted hanky, but in reality are usually little more than a painted shed’. Michael Trainor, Lead Artist & Project Curator

The brief to re-imagine the simple beach hut produced an amazing array of design solutions which catapult our ideas of seaside micro-architecture into a new aesthetic rather than an endless pastiche of imaginary heritage. Traditional seaside references are gone, replaced by structures incorporating wind turbines, saunas, camera obscura, viewing platforms and space-ace materials with only the most oblique of witty nods to sandcastles and stripey windbreaks.

Striking, unconventional and surprising many of the models celebrate the idea of happening upon something by chance when strolling along the beach, whilst others are bold creative exercises in space, light and line.

Examples on show include: Jabba by i-am associates Ltd, London, UK is a 21st century cave of laminated wood and glass whose organic form wouldn’t look out of place in one of the desert scenes of starwars; The Wizard of Oz by Lionel T Dean, Future Factories, Lincolnshire UK, a ‘twister’ of a beach-hut which plays with the idea of being boarded up out-of-season; Cheese 42 by Christian Uhl, Germany, literally a giant cheese block with surprisingly practical features; Alien Drum Sensorium by Alasdair Tooze, Gareth Hoskins, UK, inspired by beach detritus such as washed-up containers and features a sound-amplifying horn for deeper enjoyment of the crashing waves.

The diversity of design approaches demonstrated in the exhibition are reflective of not only the infinite number of possible solutions to a simple design brief, but also to the seemingly universal appeal of the beach-hut with models from artists, designers and architects from the UK, USA, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Singapore, India, China, Russia, Japan and Israel. A full list of designs on show available upon request.

The exhibition is also a testimony to the recent resurgence of interest in our coastal economies. This bold approach is indicative of the need for small towns to make big statements in the attempt to reverse the declining coastal economy in the UK.

Alongside the architectural models, the exhibition features an extraordinary full-scale beach hut, Oyster Pleasance, designed by a team including architect Will Alsop and A-Models, which visitors can sit inside and dream.

Nine of the models on display are in the process of being commissioned for full-scale construction in Summer 2007 along a 10mile stretch of coast between Mablethorpe and Chapel St. Leonards on the Lincolnshire coast, UK.

The Bathing Beauties exhibition at the Hub will be accompanied by educational resource material and a series of talks by Bathing Beauties Lead Artist & Project Curator Michael Trainor and a selection of the exhibitors. The exhibition will be available for tour from March 2008.