Skateboarding and the City: Skate and Destroy

“‘finding something’ and ‘taking it to the ultimate limit – not dwelling on it, but using it to the fullest and moving on.’” ⤴️
“using space rather than paying for it, activity rather than passivity, performing rather than watching, and creativity rather than destruction, are all potential components of our cities.” ⤴️
“‘Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11-year-olds that could see that potential.’” ⤴️
“street-skateboarding is a unique way of interacting with spaces and architecture, using shapes and surfaces in an entirely different way than they were originally intended.’” ⤴️
“an ‘urban anarchist’ who used car parks, streets, sidewalks and sewers ‘in a thousand ways that the original architects could never even dream of.’” ⤴️
“a return to skateboarding’s surf-related roots” ⤴️
“Commercial interests were also at play in the birth of street-skateboarding. Manufacturers such as Powell-Peralta anxiously sought post-skatepark terrains in order to stimulate consumer demand, and so in 1980 marketed back-to-basics ‘Street Issue’ decks, while Independent ran advertisements with lines like ‘Free on the Streets’. A year later, Santa Cruz’s advertisements focused exclusively on street- skating equipment.” ⤴️
“‘I attempt to make everything skateable,’ proclaimed Kaupas, ‘walls, curbs, ramps, whatever,’ and his ability to negotiate the ninety degree junction between the ground and a wall, as shown in Wheels of Fire and Streets on Fire, emphatically proved his point” ⤴️
“One can escape from the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, pushing it into our dreams, or giving it over to the pleasure of subjectivity.29 Raoul Vaneigem.” ⤴️
“All these became sites of appropriation, where skateboarders answer cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s call for a ‘counter-habitation’ of public ‘critical spaces’.34 But how does this occur” ⤴️
“Compared to the suburbs, Lefebvre explains, city cores are enlivened by monuments, chance encounters and everyday experiences.35” ⤴️
“such architecture frequently suffers from hard materials and wilful shapes that triumph over social needs and pleasurable activities, in turn causing theorists like Michel de Certeau to seek alternative practices that are ‘foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions’ (Figure 10.7).36” ⤴️
“such architecture frequently suffers from hard materials and wilful shapes that triumph over social needs and pleasurable activities, in turn causing theorists like Michel de Certeau to seek alternative practices that are ‘foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions’ (Figure 10.7).36” ⤴️
“Skateboarding, then, is one of Certeau’s ‘foreign’ practices, which has, according to architect Anthony Bracali, ‘energized many of these poorly conceived and under-utilized spaces with a new activity’.37” ⤴️
“because they are not explicitly occupied by institutions, public spaces like streets and squares are even more open to counter-cultural activities.40” ⤴️
“‘skaters take the spaces the others ignore’, exemplified by the countless banks, blocks, gaps, ledges and other nondescript elements catalogued by Harry Bastard in Spots.42” ⤴️
“rather than emblematic or monumental architecture, skateboarders frequently prefer” ⤴️
“the relative meaninglessness of everyday yet accessible spaces – alleys, roundabouts, plazas etc. – just as graffiti artists tend to prefer out-of- the-way yet still-visible sites.” ⤴️
“spaces without any explicit meaning are typically either everyday terrains (like sidewalks and ledges), spaces leftover after planning (‘SLOAP’, like vacant land under bridges) or decision-making domains (like office plazas) that symbolize not through overt iconography but through their large size and expansivity” ⤴️
“‘spatial degree zero’ where everything has only a functional, predictable and organized quality, and where urban experience is reduced to the reading of signs.44” ⤴️
“conventional urbanism as being ‘fraught with boredom and frustration’; we live, argues Bowman, in a ‘bland culture governed by the sacred principle of convenience’ where everything is ‘pre-planned, pre-arranged and pre-packaged’.45” ⤴️
“R.A.D., for example, recognized that while ‘new towns feel like they’re waiting’ with their empty buildings, oversized car parks, deserted walkways and unused benches” ⤴️
“skaters are ‘one step ahead of the pedestrian or static eye, the architects and the artists’, finding at Milton Keynes ‘an infinite number of skatespots – hundreds of steps, banks, handrails, curbs, carparks, flowerbeds, gaps, benches, blocks, everything’.47” ⤴️
“Thomas S. Henricks has noted, the activities of play are ‘laboratories of the possible’, sidestepping into another reality” ⤴️
“Where handrails, curbs and banks are at first glance part of a system of mundane signals, skateboarding transforms these elements into sites of energetic pleasure. Skateboarding is a critique of the emptiness of meaning in zero degree architecture.” ⤴️
“Architectural theorist Steen Eiler Rasmussen called for buildings to be engaged with through scale, proportion, rhythm, texture and even sonic qualities, a request that skaters answer by acting through sensory rhythms.52 In particular, skaters initially encounter cities as sets of objects, which they then negate by exploiting urban texture and by being, in Beal’s words, ‘keenly aware of rhythms, tempos and flows while navigating different spaces.’53 It is this focus on texture, surface and tactility that gives skaters a different kind of urban and architectural knowledge.” ⤴️
“According to Lefebvre’s conception of rhythmanalysis, all cities can be understood from rhythmic viewpoints, such as the stair architecture of Mediterranean cities providing a unique cadence for urban walking. The same applies to street-skaters, who insert what Lefebvre would call an alternating rhythm within the regularity of the city.” ⤴️
“this could not happen in medieval or renaissance cities, as street-skateboarding requires the smooth asphalt and extensive paving of contemporary urbanism and, above all, the object-space-object-space pulse of fragmented objects disposed across homogeneous space” ⤴️
“performances, skateboarders interweave their own compositions within conventional routines, such as by waging a fast assault on a plaza ledge, or by ‘skating past all the business-suit lames” ⤴️
“pedestrians ‘have little chance of understanding what has transformed’,” ⤴️
“skateboarding’s urban rhythms involve acute sensory experiences, riders relating through bodily motion to the physical minutiae of the city. ‘Skaters have that kind of sensory connectedness with the ground through the nuances of force and feel,’ considered Mullen. ‘As though motion combined with the punctuated rhythms of tricks all harmonize into an unthinking somatic awareness – chords of knowing.’6” ⤴️
“this ‘sensory connectedness’ is based on a hyper-sensitive visio” ⤴️
“‘You pay particular attention to the different textures of the streets and sidewalks as you roll,’ describes Justin Hocking” ⤴️
“the skateboard’s rumbling over the ground beneath supplies information about surface speed, grip and predictability.” ⤴️
“Even smell can be significant, allowing Chris Carnel to speak of how ‘feeling of rhythm and an aroma of sweat overcome my senses’ and Vaj Potenza of how ‘the walls have taken on my body’s odour.’” ⤴️
“A different kind of approach to urban time is therefore at work here. Modern cities are commonly a mixture of production and speculation, alternatively sacrificing long- term social benefits for short-term profits, or, conversely, short-term social needs for programmed investments.” ⤴️
“discontinuous, composed of a few encounters here and there, spread over different parts of the city” ⤴️
“‘stagnating’ at one skatespot means that ‘the regular world will always know where to find us.’78 The simple answer, according to R.A.D., is ‘always move on.’” ⤴️
“products of the modern metropolis, a newly expanded sensory mapping (Figure 10.18); as Hamm argues, calling street-skaters ‘an evolved hybrid of pedestrian and vehicle wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration.’” ⤴️
“street-skateboarding does not escape urban spaces but works physically against them.” ⤴️
“The constant planting of hands and feet gradually forms grubby reminders of skaters’ presence.” ⤴️
“why mark objects in this way? Certainly architecture contains elements of power, making us obey barriers and routes, informing us that transgressions will be met by hostile response, or simply reminding us of the pervasive presence of public institutions, the state, corporations and urban managers. This is what Lefebvre terms architecture’s ‘phallic formant’, symbolizing masculine force as image and threat.88 In this context, skateboarders’ assault is a small yet significant challenge to power, meeting like with like. Where owners and managers inscribe authority by ‘writing on the ground’ with signs, fences and other markers, traces like skateboarding marks and graffiti are forms of counter-inscription; both skateboarding and graffiti, notes Vivoni, ‘claim space by drawing lines across the urban landscape’ and so ‘challenge the prescribed order imposed through top-down planning processes’.” ⤴️
“These urban inscriptions go far beyond the semantic urbanism favoured by semiologists like Umberto Eco and Françoise Choay, who treat architecture as a text and urban experience as passive decoding.91 Instead, as August Schmarsow realized, ‘reading’ a building is a bodily act and an experienced understanding.92 Furthermore, this ‘reading’ can be entirely different to the intentions of authors (architects, planners, urban managers), even being a new writing across the page.” ⤴️
“Skateboarders are in this sense writing the city, creating vectors, traces and furrows,” ⤴️
“‘design is not about some transcendent “creation” of objects’ but rather ‘the territorialising of flow’ that can ‘articulate sensations,’ and with Jill Stoner, who sees value in the ‘minor architecture’ of inhabitation and adaptation.” ⤴️
this reminds me if feeling dictated and controlled by living in ancestral space from both past and future. and paralysed to make any active change in the present. inhabiting is restrictive, but what do i have the right to change?
“Instead of dominating city spaces, skateboarding appropriates and negates (denies or opposes) these spaces.” ⤴️
proportional impact? one person to one person for example. but you never know that subjective weight
“skateboarding is far more than urban writing, for it also involves critiques of objects (reinterpreting buildings and spaces), articulation (speaking and not just writing), consumption (consuming without owning), production (producing energies rather than things) and control (opposing urban managers).” ⤴️
“‘finding something’ and ‘taking it to the ultimate limit – not dwelling on it, but using it to the fullest and moving on.’” ⤴️
“using space rather than paying for it, activity rather than passivity, performing rather than watching, and creativity rather than destruction, are all potential components of our cities.” ⤴️
“‘Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11-year-olds that could see that potential.’” ⤴️
“street-skateboarding is a unique way of interacting with spaces and architecture, using shapes and surfaces in an entirely different way than they were originally intended.’” ⤴️
“an ‘urban anarchist’ who used car parks, streets, sidewalks and sewers ‘in a thousand ways that the original architects could never even dream of.’” ⤴️
“a return to skateboarding’s surf-related roots” ⤴️
“Commercial interests were also at play in the birth of street-skateboarding. Manufacturers such as Powell-Peralta anxiously sought post-skatepark terrains in order to stimulate consumer demand, and so in 1980 marketed back-to-basics ‘Street Issue’ decks, while Independent ran advertisements with lines like ‘Free on the Streets’. A year later, Santa Cruz’s advertisements focused exclusively on street- skating equipment.” ⤴️
“‘I attempt to make everything skateable,’ proclaimed Kaupas, ‘walls, curbs, ramps, whatever,’ and his ability to negotiate the ninety degree junction between the ground and a wall, as shown in Wheels of Fire and Streets on Fire, emphatically proved his point” ⤴️
“One can escape from the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, pushing it into our dreams, or giving it over to the pleasure of subjectivity.29 Raoul Vaneigem.” ⤴️
“All these became sites of appropriation, where skateboarders answer cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s call for a ‘counter-habitation’ of public ‘critical spaces’.34 But how does this occur” ⤴️
“Compared to the suburbs, Lefebvre explains, city cores are enlivened by monuments, chance encounters and everyday experiences.35” ⤴️
“such architecture frequently suffers from hard materials and wilful shapes that triumph over social needs and pleasurable activities, in turn causing theorists like Michel de Certeau to seek alternative practices that are ‘foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions’ (Figure 10.7).36” ⤴️
“such architecture frequently suffers from hard materials and wilful shapes that triumph over social needs and pleasurable activities, in turn causing theorists like Michel de Certeau to seek alternative practices that are ‘foreign to the “geometrical” or “geographical” space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions’ (Figure 10.7).36” ⤴️
“Skateboarding, then, is one of Certeau’s ‘foreign’ practices, which has, according to architect Anthony Bracali, ‘energized many of these poorly conceived and under-utilized spaces with a new activity’.37” ⤴️
“because they are not explicitly occupied by institutions, public spaces like streets and squares are even more open to counter-cultural activities.40” ⤴️
“‘skaters take the spaces the others ignore’, exemplified by the countless banks, blocks, gaps, ledges and other nondescript elements catalogued by Harry Bastard in Spots.42” ⤴️
“rather than emblematic or monumental architecture, skateboarders frequently prefer” ⤴️
“the relative meaninglessness of everyday yet accessible spaces – alleys, roundabouts, plazas etc. – just as graffiti artists tend to prefer out-of- the-way yet still-visible sites.” ⤴️
“spaces without any explicit meaning are typically either everyday terrains (like sidewalks and ledges), spaces leftover after planning (‘SLOAP’, like vacant land under bridges) or decision-making domains (like office plazas) that symbolize not through overt iconography but through their large size and expansivity” ⤴️
“‘spatial degree zero’ where everything has only a functional, predictable and organized quality, and where urban experience is reduced to the reading of signs.44” ⤴️
“conventional urbanism as being ‘fraught with boredom and frustration’; we live, argues Bowman, in a ‘bland culture governed by the sacred principle of convenience’ where everything is ‘pre-planned, pre-arranged and pre-packaged’.45” ⤴️
“R.A.D., for example, recognized that while ‘new towns feel like they’re waiting’ with their empty buildings, oversized car parks, deserted walkways and unused benches” ⤴️
“skaters are ‘one step ahead of the pedestrian or static eye, the architects and the artists’, finding at Milton Keynes ‘an infinite number of skatespots – hundreds of steps, banks, handrails, curbs, carparks, flowerbeds, gaps, benches, blocks, everything’.47” ⤴️
“Thomas S. Henricks has noted, the activities of play are ‘laboratories of the possible’, sidestepping into another reality” ⤴️
“Where handrails, curbs and banks are at first glance part of a system of mundane signals, skateboarding transforms these elements into sites of energetic pleasure. Skateboarding is a critique of the emptiness of meaning in zero degree architecture.” ⤴️
“Architectural theorist Steen Eiler Rasmussen called for buildings to be engaged with through scale, proportion, rhythm, texture and even sonic qualities, a request that skaters answer by acting through sensory rhythms.52 In particular, skaters initially encounter cities as sets of objects, which they then negate by exploiting urban texture and by being, in Beal’s words, ‘keenly aware of rhythms, tempos and flows while navigating different spaces.’53 It is this focus on texture, surface and tactility that gives skaters a different kind of urban and architectural knowledge.” ⤴️
“According to Lefebvre’s conception of rhythmanalysis, all cities can be understood from rhythmic viewpoints, such as the stair architecture of Mediterranean cities providing a unique cadence for urban walking. The same applies to street-skaters, who insert what Lefebvre would call an alternating rhythm within the regularity of the city.” ⤴️
“this could not happen in medieval or renaissance cities, as street-skateboarding requires the smooth asphalt and extensive paving of contemporary urbanism and, above all, the object-space-object-space pulse of fragmented objects disposed across homogeneous space” ⤴️
“performances, skateboarders interweave their own compositions within conventional routines, such as by waging a fast assault on a plaza ledge, or by ‘skating past all the business-suit lames” ⤴️
“pedestrians ‘have little chance of understanding what has transformed’,” ⤴️
“skateboarding’s urban rhythms involve acute sensory experiences, riders relating through bodily motion to the physical minutiae of the city. ‘Skaters have that kind of sensory connectedness with the ground through the nuances of force and feel,’ considered Mullen. ‘As though motion combined with the punctuated rhythms of tricks all harmonize into an unthinking somatic awareness – chords of knowing.’6” ⤴️
“this ‘sensory connectedness’ is based on a hyper-sensitive visio” ⤴️
“‘You pay particular attention to the different textures of the streets and sidewalks as you roll,’ describes Justin Hocking” ⤴️
“the skateboard’s rumbling over the ground beneath supplies information about surface speed, grip and predictability.” ⤴️
“Even smell can be significant, allowing Chris Carnel to speak of how ‘feeling of rhythm and an aroma of sweat overcome my senses’ and Vaj Potenza of how ‘the walls have taken on my body’s odour.’” ⤴️
“A different kind of approach to urban time is therefore at work here. Modern cities are commonly a mixture of production and speculation, alternatively sacrificing long- term social benefits for short-term profits, or, conversely, short-term social needs for programmed investments.” ⤴️
“discontinuous, composed of a few encounters here and there, spread over different parts of the city” ⤴️
“‘stagnating’ at one skatespot means that ‘the regular world will always know where to find us.’78 The simple answer, according to R.A.D., is ‘always move on.’” ⤴️
“products of the modern metropolis, a newly expanded sensory mapping (Figure 10.18); as Hamm argues, calling street-skaters ‘an evolved hybrid of pedestrian and vehicle wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration.’” ⤴️
“street-skateboarding does not escape urban spaces but works physically against them.” ⤴️
“The constant planting of hands and feet gradually forms grubby reminders of skaters’ presence.” ⤴️
“why mark objects in this way? Certainly architecture contains elements of power, making us obey barriers and routes, informing us that transgressions will be met by hostile response, or simply reminding us of the pervasive presence of public institutions, the state, corporations and urban managers. This is what Lefebvre terms architecture’s ‘phallic formant’, symbolizing masculine force as image and threat.88 In this context, skateboarders’ assault is a small yet significant challenge to power, meeting like with like. Where owners and managers inscribe authority by ‘writing on the ground’ with signs, fences and other markers, traces like skateboarding marks and graffiti are forms of counter-inscription; both skateboarding and graffiti, notes Vivoni, ‘claim space by drawing lines across the urban landscape’ and so ‘challenge the prescribed order imposed through top-down planning processes’.” ⤴️
“These urban inscriptions go far beyond the semantic urbanism favoured by semiologists like Umberto Eco and Françoise Choay, who treat architecture as a text and urban experience as passive decoding.91 Instead, as August Schmarsow realized, ‘reading’ a building is a bodily act and an experienced understanding.92 Furthermore, this ‘reading’ can be entirely different to the intentions of authors (architects, planners, urban managers), even being a new writing across the page.” ⤴️
“Skateboarders are in this sense writing the city, creating vectors, traces and furrows,” ⤴️
“‘design is not about some transcendent “creation” of objects’ but rather ‘the territorialising of flow’ that can ‘articulate sensations,’ and with Jill Stoner, who sees value in the ‘minor architecture’ of inhabitation and adaptation.” ⤴️
this reminds me if feeling dictated and controlled by living in ancestral space from both past and future. and paralysed to make any active change in the present. inhabiting is restrictive, but what do i have the right to change?
“Instead of dominating city spaces, skateboarding appropriates and negates (denies or opposes) these spaces.” ⤴️
proportional impact? one person to one person for example. but you never know that subjective weight
“skateboarding is far more than urban writing, for it also involves critiques of objects (reinterpreting buildings and spaces), articulation (speaking and not just writing), consumption (consuming without owning), production (producing energies rather than things) and control (opposing urban managers).” ⤴️