Keith Clougherty

Tide Castle as an Aesthetic Breakwater

The high tide line - bringer of seaweed and flotsam, destroyer of sand castles - is on the rise. Each morning, Dade County beachcombers scrape these lines of seaweed and trash into transfer piles that are then brought to landfills. Since moving home in 2022 to care for my late father, Fran Clougherty, the broker who sold the W Hotel Miami Beach, I’ve made a ritual of harvesting the tide transfer pile next to the W for sculptural materials. 

Tide Castle an imaginative king tide barrier constructed from scavenged beach toys and plastic detritus, classic Miami Beach masonry, and subtropical plants. The project responds to some of Miami's most pressing environmental threats: plastic pollution, overdevelopment, and sea level rise. A lush microcosm of beach culture, this installation memorializes a vanishing place while suggesting creative green infrastructure interventions to preserve it. Tide Castle can be deployed in a number of forms: within galleries, along seawalls, or at the beach.