Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
More product placement: I've contributed to photographer Steve Harries new book 'Reading Lines'. The book is a collection of photos of London skateboarders and the public spaces they explore, exploit and interact with. Here is my contribution: We are surrounded by manufactured landscapes, by environments created out of ideas, culture and - even occasionally - need. From the peak of national park mountains to the depths of underground car parks, descriptions of environments play a significant role in how we understand both our context and ourselves. These descriptions span the full octave of media: a poem, a painting, a policy document, or a masterplan. Think of Wordsworth walking in the Lake District, Capability Brown sculpting aristocratic grounds, Constable painting landscapes, EDAW masterplanning a district, Arup traffic planning a car park, or JG Ballard describing the psychosexual quality of the Westway. These are all acts of landscape creation - they change the ways we think and use our habitat. Contemporary landscapes are often born out of rational masterplans, of logical and plausible arguments discussed, modeled and drawn. On the ground however, their singular belief is hard to fathom. Think of the post-war landscapes that were built to reconstruct the country not only physically but also socially. That progressive, idealistic era is strangely puzzling to us. These are landscapes whose continuing certainty is at odds with our own doubt. Their belief in progress is at odds with our experience. We follow their utopian armature with a slouching apathy. They sometimes feel like the puzzling remains of a vanished civilization. Perhaps these landscapes, though built by man, they were intended to be vacant - empty, like scenes in an artificial desert. The emptiness of contemporary landscapes holds a fascination. There is a futuristic appeal in tessellating hexagonal concrete slabs, a poetry in the to-the-horizon tarmac of airport car parks in early morning mists, an appeal in the sculptural motorway on-ramps and off ramps, flyovers and elevated sections. Part of this fascination is the feeling that what you are walking on might not really be the surface of the planet. In fact, the appeal of hard landscapes is the alien, un-natural, un-earthly sensations that they allow us to experience. Hard landscapes are not simply coverings with practical qualities. They are representations of the earth laid over its surface: Planetary masks, created by landscape architects leafing through catalogues full of concrete pavers. Like glass, tarmac never sets completely solid. Streets are really rivers flowing with the thickest black treacle. A viscous gloop in whose depths lurk stringy wires and lumpy pipes. Like the chocolate topping on a crunchy muesli bar. On very hot days you can feel its velvety softness with your heel. The Situationists claimed that the beach lies beneath the pavement. Reality, however, is more exotic than rhetoric. Roads are million year old sludge drawn from deep beneath the ocean. Most road asphalt is a by-product of crude oil processing. Once all the valuable bits have been removed, the denuded left overs are made into asphalt. Roads are just a sticky kind of dirt, rearranged into linear patterns. It's like mud that's been edited. Asphalt is an abstract version of the ground. Dark, compressed, inert and flat. Somewhere between mud and stone. Equivalent pretty much across the country - consistent meaning, regardless of local vernacular or materials. Endlessly extendable and always exactly the same. Where even now a truck and a roller are adding a three-lane bypass. All of this freshly pressed blackness flows on to the horizon. Crisp and clean and unspoilt. Glistening like overnight snow, only blacker and harder. As full of the promise of love as wedding cake icing. So beautiful and textured that you want to step barefoot onto this unspoilt world. Forests of signposts, hosts of golden yellow sodium lamps for a Wordsworth of the highway - deeper in poetic loneliness behind the wheel of a 4x4 than walking in the Lake District ever allowed. A brand new skin for the earth. That makes the world look newborn, so that it can't be anything but innocent. More wonderful than the ancient craggy, scuffed planet beneath. Perhaps the real modern poets are those who create these landscapes: The Capability Browns of the motorway system, the Gertrude Jekylls of the parking lot. Driven by desire to reclaim earth as an unspoilt paradise. Highway engineers who dream of being naked Tarmac Adams in a Tarmac Eden. Think of liquid concrete poured into its shuttering during the construction process. The grey sludge flowing into its mould around cages of reinforcement. Just imagine: London's South Bank was once entirely liquid. Perhaps its solidity might be temporary like an ice sculpture. Maybe the chemical bonds formed in the cement during its curing might reverse, returning the building to dust, stone and water again. An entire cultural complex washing into the Thames. It is within this concrete landscape that new ways of occupying space have developed. We see it in the complex social politics of driving, but perhaps most expressively in the skateboarders who use, or rather mis-use terrain of contemporary public space. You can tell they are near when you hear the sound of their wheels running over concrete. The texture of the ground amplified by wheel and board into rattling sonic streams describing the minutiae of surface texture. And you can see the new spatial interpretations in the skaters trajectories. In their flips, switches, and in their bodies twisting above the ground. Momentum and gravity, and bodies loose from the surface. Why choose these environments? What is the significance of these landscapes as backdrops to act out enigmatic dramas of velocity? Perhaps - amongst the sheer weight of concrete and tarmac, against the solidity of material presence, and within the determined logics of the masterplanner - the skaters act is an expression of a desire to cut the bonds of that tie us to the surface, to escape the physics of the ground plane. Many be it is an acting out of a dream where gravity no longer applied to humans and people begin to float into the air. An anticipation of the moment when heels, then toes loose contact with the ground and we fall upwards into the sky: Perhaps it is a plea: Anything to feel weightless again, below thousands of tonnes of concrete. More info at >>Creative Review<< Also, see Steve's photos revisiting the locations of iconic movie scenes >>on his website<< - where the intrigue is played out between the collective dramatic narrative of the cinematic image and the banal everyday scenes.
I'm sure where you can pick up a copy of the book, but there is an accompanying exhibition at the Carhartt store, 15-17 Earlham Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9LL.
Posted by anothersam at February 9, 2007 2:40 PM. 1 Comments
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Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
Northampton - Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
Advertising Central Milton Keynes
The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Christopher Dresser at the V&A
Fugitives and Refugees' - Chuck Palahniuk
Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
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skate or die
i started like three months and i can f****ing jump an 10 stair