Time for skateparks
The August 7th 2007 issue of Time magazine had an article about the design of modern skateparks titled “It’s All in the Swoop.” Seriously? August of 2007 and I’m just now finding out about it? Come on people! Anyway, by “modern” they mean tranny, so if you’re looking for street plaza coverage you can save your breath and write a letter to the editor – theirs, not me. I didn’t write it, I’m just reporting on what’s out there. I suspect that delving into that as well would have taken up more editorial space then they had alloted. Quoted in the interview are Wally Hollyday, Mark Hubbard and Tim Payne. Mentioned in article are the firms of SITE Design Group, Dreamland, Team Pain and Grindline. An interesting point is raised by suggesting current skatepark design is also affecting playground and landscape architecture, even for non-skating spaces. There are a few pictures in the print layout that are not duplicated in the online version of the article, so they are preserved and presented after the jump. Both pieces mention a photo essay on the history and evolution of skateboarding but fail to provide a link to it beyond Time.com, and plugging the title into the search comes up blank.
– Thanks to John Aguilar for the goods.
Click to enlarge.
super rad! seriously, that’s too cool.
Here’s the Photo Essay.
It’s amazing to me that they still have to explain to people what skateboarding is:
“Skateboarding has been around since the late 1950s, when California surfers began attaching wheels to short boards so that they could retrieve on dry land just a bit of the feeling they got from a wave. In no time it had evolved into an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style.”
And they skip from the 70’s to the 90’s.
“an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style.”
hmmm….
What about an “anti-social expression that derived, like graffitti, from the eternal impulse to fuck up the concrete wasteland with style.”
Yeah, nothing notable happened then.
aside from me being born 🙂