Fiberglass gardens and the future of social nudism

From strip malls to spas, how space shapes the possibilities of social nudity

A 1970s McDonald’s dining area featuring the iconic fiberglass “Apple Pie Tree” and hamburger stools, built for play, not scrolling. | Image credit unknown; widely circulated online

Returning to the Garden of Eden.

It’s a metaphor that’s deeply woven through the history of nudism, an image of man returning to a natural state, at one with the wilderness. But this metaphor doesn’t entirely work. Eden was not the wilderness; it was a garden. The wilderness was the punishment. Eden was, well, Edenic because it had been created to be so. Adam and Eve were comfortably nude in the garden as the garden had been created for them to be comfortably nude in.

I was thinking along these lines earlier this year when I traveled down from the rust belt to visit my in-laws, who had recently retired to a rapidly expanding town on the southeast coast. This is a town I had visited before, but not for nearly twenty years. The change in that time had been remarkable. What I had known as essentially a small, working-class resort town had become a labyrinth of strip malls and gated developments.

My in-laws' new house is one of those that sprung up in this wave of new construction. And like most new construction, it’s built around an open floor plan. The kitchen, the living room, the dining room, it’s all just one thing and everywhere in the room is constantly visible from everywhere else in the room. Sitting in the house felt as if you were sitting in public, with little sense of privacy. And lack of privacy is definitely the sort of thing you notice when you’re at you in-laws. I noticed that we all got into the habit of pulling out our phones to create a little bubble around ourselves every now and then.

Their home is also part of what’s called a mixed-use development, abutting a strip mall anchored by a small Wal-Mart. Not far down the road from their house is another of these mixed-use developments, this one modeled on a “New Urban” style. About four blocks of densely-packed restaurants and higher-end clothing shops and art galleries, plunked down somewhat incongruously in the middle of what had until very recently been a swamp.

Something struck me as I was navigating my way through all of this new construction. Neither the strip mall immediately beside my in-laws’ home nor the dense New Urban development was a place for lingering. There was no sense that this was a place where you might meet people or have chance encounters. Everything seemed to be designed to get people from their cars to the store they were going to and out again as quickly as possible. The space seemed to be built to make it easy for people to ignore one another. And, usually aided by their own little phone bubbles, that’s exactly what they were doing.

Designing for connection and nudity

Building isolation into the environment has been a growing trend in American architecture for the past thirty years or more. I can honestly think of no clearer example than the designs of America’s most ubiquitous restaurant, McDonald’s. Think of the design of a McDonald’s built in the 70s, a wonderland of fiberglass statues where the centerpiece of the restaurant was often literally a playground. And a playground often surrounded by lunch-counter style seating where the grownups could chat while the kids were playing, often chatting about how absurd it was for a grownup to be sitting on a fiberglass stool shaped like a hamburger. And all of it deeply committed to a color palette that managed to be somehow simultaneously overwhelmingly colorful and overwhelmingly brown.

A McDonald’s built today essentially has the aesthetics of a minimum security prison. The booths have gotten smaller and farther away from one another. The lunch counter seating and the playground are gone. The warm earth tones have been replaced by gun metal grays and charcoal blacks. If you want to sit on a hamburger stool, you’re going to have to bring your own. It all just feels lonely. Isolating. There’s little to do except stare at your phone while you eat.

We have, over the past few decades, committed to building private spaces where it’s impossible to be alone, and public spaces where it’s impossible not to be alone.

This was driven even more home when I visited the old, working-class section of the town by the beach, where the old boardwalk was still lined by a string of delightfully tacky gift shops interrupted only by tiny places that served hot dogs and ice cream through a window. The ocean was right there. Pausing to look out at a low-flying pelican or passing dolphin was to invite a conversation with a complete stranger. I also started wondering what it would be like if it were a clothing-optional beach. And I thought probably not much different. And I also began thinking about why that was the first space I had been in on this trip that felt like that.

This old boardwalk was easily imaginable as a place of social nudity because it was built as a social space. But those mixed-use developments were not. Social nudity there seemed distinctly unimaginable. The newer spaces were almost antisocial in their design. It was the difference between sitting naked on a fiberglass hamburger and sitting naked in a little gray booth. One might be slightly absurd, but the kind of absurd experience you can have a conversation about. The other just feels as if you’re in a hospital waiting for a mildly invasive procedure. One environment is social, the other antisocial.

Lessons from Edenic spaces

I think there’s some insight to be gained here for the future of social nudism, and particularly for the future of the institutions of social nudism.

The most pleasant and most successful clothing-optional resorts I’ve been to in recent years were two places that advertised themselves primarily as spas, located at hot springs in Southern California and Colorado. These places were also genuinely clothing optional, at both locations there was a mixture of about 50/50 clothed and unclothed bathers soaking in the pools. But at neither location did this interfere with conversation and social interaction. Nudity, or non-nudity, was taken as simply a matter of personal preference among people who were just getting along with each other.

What these places also shared was that they were both, each in its own way, Edenic. They had been built as if they were gardens. The grounds were well-landscaped and well maintained. There were spaces to mix in with the other people there, as well as places where you could retreat from the crowd for a little isolation, but everywhere in both locations there clean lines of sight throughout the entire grounds, so the possibility of lurking and voyeurism were kept to a minimum by the space itself. The fact that these were physically well-designed social spaces helped curb antisocial behavior. Both places had the egalitarian feel of the very best of Frederick Law Olmsted’s public park designs. They were created as natural environments that were also social spaces. They were little gardens.

This used to be the default in designing public spaces in America. Even in those 1970’s McDonald’s, the centerpiece of the playground was often a giant fiberglass tree.

I’ve lost track of how many articles I’ve read in the past few decades about the crisis for the future of nudism, usually with a focus on ways to market nudism to newcomers.. Usually this comes in the form of nudism as conveying individual health benefits, or as being a means of self-discovery or self-actualization. All of these are perfectly true. But they also all only focus on the self. And the self is only one component of social nudity.

I have long held the thought that what we see as a crisis in nudism is really just one lens on a crisis in broader society, one that’s been going on for long enough now that one of the first books on the topic, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, is now available in a Twentieth Anniversary edition, with things having only gotten worse since its initial publication.

People are not joining nudist organizations for the same reasons they aren’t joining bowling leagues. There’s a crisis of social connection in America, a crisis exacerbated by the omnipresence of phones and social media. But also exacerbated by the way we’ve constructed the world around us.

While to me the open floor plans and New Urban isolation are strange and new, there’s multiple generations now that have never lived in anything else. While twenty years ago Putnam was worried that Americans were forgetting how to form these social connections, we may now be facing generations that have never experienced these connections. I think of the use of the word community and how that historically has meant people in physical proximity, but now seems to be used primarily to describe people with some affinity or identity, enabled by online communication, regardless of proximity. I can’t help but think that something somewhere has gone wrong when someone’s community consists almost entirely of people they’ve never actually met. But, if you’ve grown up in one of these spaces where the public is private and the private public, I can absolutely see how you would see that as normal.

Toward a new landscape of nudity

The future of nudism may be in returning to the Garden of Eden. But returning to the garden will require building that garden. And that garden should be, like Olmsted’s parks or a 1970s McDonald’s, egalitarian in principle and execution, designed to be a welcoming, social space. Thinking of the physical design of clothing-optional spaces should include thinking of how that design can encourage social interaction. It should also place a high priority of being pleasant. Because people, even those highly coveted young people, still like to be in pleasant spaces.

Building pleasant spaces that accommodate genuinely clothing-optional use would be building an on-ramp into broader social nudity. And yes, I’m aware this will require capital investment. But we could think of that as a new area for nudist entrepreneurship. While I will always remain a strong supported of landed clubs, building smaller-scale clothing-optional saunas, pools, or spas in urban environments may be more what the future looks like. Not only would these offer more opportunity to attract new participants by the sheer benefit of proximity, but for the nudist movement to be a leader in helping rebuild social spaces in America could be some of the best publicity the movement has ever had. And in no small part because a strict no phones allowed policy would also obviously need to be enforced. It might even be just what the country needs.

The reconnecting with nature we may most need right now is reconnecting with our nature as social animals. And sometimes, social animals just need fiberglass hamburgers to sit on and remind them that they are social. The next Eden may not be one garden, but lots of little, well-tended gardens. 🪐

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