The Nautical Style

The Nautical Style by Eric de Maré, published by Architectural Press in 1973, is a beautifully specialised study of the architecture and engineering of the maritime world: sea walls, piers, harbours, docks, lighthouses and all the solid practical structures built to deal with the awkward fact that the sea rarely shows much respect for architecture. Its full subtitle, An Aspect of the Functional Tradition , gives the game away. This is not a book about anchors printed on cushions or how to decorate a bathroom so that it resembles a yacht club. It is about the genuine nautical style created when engineers and builders designed things because they actually had to work. Eric de Maré was particularly interested in functional architecture: structures whose beauty arose not from applied decoration but from materials, proportion and purpose. In the maritime world this produces an especially satisfying collection of objects because a harbour wall does not have much opportunity for pretence. It either survives the sea or it does not. Piers, docks, breakwaters and lighthouses are similarly unforgiving. You can draw something elegant on paper, but eventually the North Atlantic gets a vote. The book uses photographs and drawings to examine these structures as architecture in their own right, rather than merely as background scenery for ships. It is an appealing idea because maritime engineering has a habit of being overlooked until somebody notices just how handsome a granite pier, iron lighthouse or dock gate can actually be. The Victorians and their predecessors were particularly good at this sort of thing. They built practical infrastructure with a degree of visual confidence that modern civilisation occasionally struggles to reproduce. A lighthouse was a machine for preventing ships from hitting rocks, but apparently there was no reason it could not also look magnificent. A dock was somewhere to load cargo, but it might as well contain enough masonry to suggest the Roman Empire had briefly gone into shipping. And a harbour wall could simply be a harbour wall while still possessing more architectural presence than certain entire modern housing estates. Published in an oblong format and running to around 88 pages, The Nautical Style is heavily illustrated and includes subjects such as sea walls, piers, harbours, docks and lighthouses. That visual emphasis makes it particularly enjoyable for readers who like architectural photography, industrial history or engineering but do not necessarily wish to spend six hundred pages calculating load-bearing stresses. There is also something very 1970s Architectural Press about the whole thing. Here is a serious book saying, essentially: ?Look at this dock wall. No, properly look at it.? And once you do, you begin to see the point. Functional structures accumulate personality. Stone gets weathered. Iron rusts. Timber bends. Steps disappear into water. Lighthouses acquire the battered dignity of buildings that have spent a century being attacked by weather and have decided not to make a fuss about it. The book therefore sits rather nicely between architecture, transport, industrial history and maritime history . It is about buildings, but buildings shaped by ships. It is about engineering, but engineering with visual character. And it is about the sea without requiring anybody to actually go sailing. For architects, photographers, maritime enthusiasts, industrial archaeologists, lighthouse collectors and anyone who becomes unreasonably interested in harbour masonry, this is exactly the sort of book that can turn an innocent seaside walk into a lengthy examination of bollards. Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. The dust jacket is complete but frayed around the edges , showing the sort of wear expected after more than fifty years of surviving shelves, moves and the occasional less-than-gentle encounter with another book. The jacket remains present and intact overal.…