This mere tome, compressed on 280 pages, proves the diverse demands on today’s ‘beachlife’: floating megaprojects on the coasts of Dubai and Abu Dhabi tower alongside the work of small architects like Nils Holger Moormann’s Walden, land art in the tradition of Dani Karavan beside artistic interventions emphasising climate change and the problems of refugees. The publishers have divided their book into five chapters: leisure, hospitality, art, residential and products. However, this is only a kind of minimum consensus, and one wonders whether being arranged according to building size and typology would have made more sense in this case. As a result, the sequence occasionally seems a little haphazard, and the only alternative is to claw one’s way forward from project to project through the book. However, despite occasional inconsistencies in the quality of design, this is not difficult as the book’s layout is appealing, the text concise and written with esprit.

As conclusion, two findings can be drawn from the book. Firstly - very few designers in fact used the element water for their work; the majority were satisfied with one more or less clear ‘sea view’. Secondly - at best it would appear that the visual artists successfully lend today’s ambivalent beaches an expressive face; far from expressive needs and the obligations of functionality they were able to deal with subjects such as the throwaway society, global warming or terrorism worldwide. An installation like Gregor Schneider’s 21 Beach Cells, where the German artist erected 21 Guantanamo-like wire mesh cells on Bondi Beach in Sydney, depicts the downside of global beach tourism and its security demands. It also clearly illustrates that there is a ‘beachlife’ beyond the one shown here – even if this has not been a subject for architects and designers up to now.