Skateboarders may not be well-versed in architectural theory or the ultimate connoisseurs of design, but they possess one of the most unique and intricate relationships to the built environment as we know it. Exploring the interrelation between this extreme sport and architecture reveals the inherent complexities of urban space, and opens up an entirely new perspective on how to experience the city.

In the beginning

As the little sibling of surf, skateboarding emerged around the 1930s, first becoming popular in California in the late 1950s as surfers took to the streets when waves were flat. By the time skaters were exploring empty pools and concrete pipes in the 1970s, skate parks were erected as an attempt to get them off the streets, and architects and urban planners began "protecting" their oevres by placing intrusive uprights on benches, or roughening the surfaces of concrete aprons. But skating a purpose-built park defeated the purpose; skaters revel in discovering the rideable nooks and crannies of a city, and in the 1980's they took back to the streets. Ever since, the skater has come to embody much more than just a cool, gritty sport. Whethere they know it or not, skaters symbolize a bold political ideology and perform a critique of urban architecture's everyday use.

Finsbury Park Skatepark, London, UK. © James Hudson

Counterculture and architecture as experience

Renowned architectural historian-slash-skater Iain Borden has been a central figure to this discussion. As noted by Sam Spurr in his analysis of Borden's book, Skateboarding, Space & The City: Architecture and the Body,

"Skatekateboarding 'challenges the notion that space is there to be obeyed,' refusing to accept the city in its conventional arrangement of thoroughfares, walls, and stairs." Here it is possible to see the influence the influence of Bernard Tschumi's architectural texts and his ideas on the event as the construction of architecture. Unlike the silent city of buildings, the living city is a matrix of experiential opportunities"

He also introduced the notion of skateboarding as a reaction against commodity consumption--wherein skateboarders use urban space and buildings without buying anything, thus defying the social norms of consuming when not working--and as an appropriation of spaces of power as temporary places of free expression.

In effect, the skater experiences architecture in an entirely different manner than the rest of us city dwellers: For them,  space is not imposed by the architect or planner; they experience it with their bodies, designing it as they carve and grind through space, regardless of its intended purpose. If surfers use their bodies to experience nature, then skaters do so to experience the built environment. Actively writing the city instead of passively reading it, skateboarding, Borden claims, actually becomes architecture, "not as a thing, but as a production of space, time and social being."

In an interview with Borden from 2003 dug up by skynoise, he said:

"Skateboarding lets you experience buildings not as a set of objects, designed by architects, but as a set of spatial experiences. By this I mean that moving around on a skateboard makes you consider buildings and landscapes as a set of opportunities to skate. You are constantly sizing up banks, ledges, curves, curbs and so on for their ability to be skated upon. So there is this initial process of interrogation; looking at architecture differently, working out whether it can be skated or not. And then there is the actual engagement with the architecture, using the skateboard and your body in relation to the physicality of the building; and here one appreciates architecture differently again, this time as a direct sensual engagement, less to do with the mind and more to do with the living body that we all possess."

Iain Borden: "An almost sexual experience"

In Borden's 3cities project, he describes this further:

"When skateboarders ride along a wall, over a fire hydrant or up a building, they are entirely indifferent to its function or ideological content. They are therefore no longer even concerned with its presence as a building, as a composition of spaces and materials logically disposed to create a coherent urban entity. By focusing only on certain elements (ledges, walls, banks, rails) of the building, skateboarders deny architecture’s existence as a discrete three-dimensional indivisible thing, knowable only as a totality, and treat it instead as a set of floating, detached, physical elements isolated from each other; where architects’ considerations of building "users" imply a quantification of the body subordinate to space and design, the skater’s performative body has, "the ability to deal with a given set of pre-determined circumstances and to extract what you want and to discard the rest." Skateboarding reproduces architecture in its own measure, re-editing it as series of surfaces, textures and micro-objects."

Architecture deconstructed

Flipping architecture on its head, the focus is shifted onto those who radically experience and use space and buildings, rather than those who design and make it. In this case, the users (or makers, as it may be), take architecture apart piece by piece, deconstructing the sum into all of its parts; walls, handrails, steps, curbs and every other rideable surface it comprises. That's why its no surprise that most legendary spots are known or named after their most significant structural component, whether its the underpass at Brookly Banks in New York, the Wallenberg Four (steps) in San Francisco, the handrails of an English school in Ipswich, the walkway and planters of the 1985 Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York (by architect John Portman), the marble runways of New York’s Museum of Natural History, the edges at Tokyo Station, or the ledges at Barcelona's MACBA.

Brookly Banks © Julie Glassberg for the NYTimes

Photo: © Rubén Núnez

Contemporary architecture firms seem to be taking note. In a Wired article, Alejandro Zaera-Polo of London's Foreign Office Architects commented on their park in Barcelona, "We have this fascination with buildings becoming topography, and skateboarders have that physical experience." The article also reveals how Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Center was unofficially tricked out for skaters, and that Snøhetta even sought out their advice in designing their Oslo Opera House--a claim that several Norweigan commentors on the post contend as false and point out quite the contrary.

Oslo Opera House. Photo © Jiri Havran via Wired

Architectural elements as tricks, via Wired

Park in Barcelona Forum. Photo © FOA

Whether or not it is true, however, it wouldn't come as a surprise. Though far more accepted than it was back in the seventies, and perhaps even embraced by some architects today, skateboarding continues to be perceived to an extent as an act of nonconformity and disobedience. Unlike most sports, it is not confined to a designated space, but rather, occupies the public realm at will. Ironically, it is often construed as a threat to the built environment, when in fact it is a manifestation of a deep appreciation of architecture, unorthodox or subversive as it may be.

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Other references:

The Independent
3 Cities Project

First photo © thoughtwax on flickr