The Benton County Skateboard Alliance is holding their second annual music and art benefit for the skatepark they are trying to get built. These guys are making it happen, and if you are near that part of Oregon this Saturday you should make a point of helping them out. Last year’s event looked like it was well attended and fun to boot. Live music and an art show/sale to benefit the concrete. Details at the BCSA site, or you can check out a flyer for the event by Diego Banuelos after the jump.

We’ve covered marginally skateable architecture, so now we travel to Punta del Este, Uruguay for this apartment complex surrounded by waves of bricked banks.

This corner is a JAWBREAKER, since the first time I passed by this corner during the 80’s I felt in love with the arquitecture. Good that It was free to ride this “wave”… The “skate abuse” of the place during early 90’s made skateboarding prohibited. Nowadays there’s a security guard 24/7 and they don’t even like people who go there to take pictures. If u come with a skateboard you’ll have a not so nice welcome.

Check out the pictures and the video on Yerbah. – Thanks to Luciano for the tip.

Here’s a roundup of some more skateable architecture. These aren’t just fantasy proposals. The top two are scheduled for construction and the bottom two have already been built. I titled this collection “marginally skateable” not because the terrain is barely skateable, but because the skateable features are just a small part of the overall design.

Just as there is a group of enthusiasts who get a kick out of building life size models of objects, including skateboards, from Legos, there’s another group of Lego builders that exclusively builds larger than life (10x) replicas of Lego figures out of… Legos. Dave over at Brick Player has made a 10x replica of a Lego minifig skateboarder. In case you are wondering, he’s got a popsicle in his hand for some reason.

Check out Ettubrute’s Flickr set of Dutch architects MVRDV’s Villa VPro. I have some really cool concept books by these guys so I was psyched to see something they had actually built. At the first view of the ouside I’m thinking that looks skateable and it just kept getting better. Hey, you could get a job with a Dutch television studio.

– Thanks to Pinch for the link.

My grandfather once made me a pretend switchblade out of a clothespin, rubber band and a popsicle stick. He also made me some stilts and one of those metal rings you push down the street with a stick. $100 will get you this historical inaccuracy, curiosity, and conversation starter. It’s a replica of the precursor to the skateboard, an orange crate scooter. The irony is that instead of roller skate trucks, it has actual skateboard trucks. It’s kind of like watching a period movie about a civil war vet where the female love interest is a white chick raised by native americans but still has a feathered 80’s hairdo. Or a WWII movie about Hitler where all the Nazis have British accents. Mountain Boy Sledworks makes these things by hand.

Legos are some of the best toys ever. I’ll be a skater for life, but I might not be able to actually skate at age 90, assuming I make it that far. But if the arthritis gets too bad for me, I’ll still be able to build stuff with those oversized Legos they make for preeschool kids. Bricks 4 Life! Nathan Sawaya is a brick artist who among other excellent constructions, also built a lifesize skateboard sculpture out of Legos. Check it out on The Art of the Brick.

[Source: Zedomax]

Hugh Holland shot a lot of skate photos in the 70’s. There are some great shots online at Lifelounge. The best part was is that they aren’t a subset of the same photos of the era that have been making the rounds for the past decade. Holland came to shoot skaters after already being a photographer. So, aside from the skate photos, a lot of Holland’s shots are taken from more of a photojournalist’s perspective. The Lifelounge post is over a year old. Hugh’s had some exhibits and possibly a catalog from the show published. I can’t find an active official web site for Hugh, and everyone seems to point back to the Lifelounge collection. It’s good stuff. Check it out.

Since there’s no date on this guerilla art installation by Madrid artist SpY, we can’t say whether his ramp reinterpretation in his Urban Furniture collection was something he conceived before or after he saw Conahan’s very similar vision. Still, the soccer field painted on a miniramp is pretty clever. I just saw a graphic on the the web that showed a soccer player kicking a ball and an American football player running with a football side by side. The caption under the soccer player said “foot ball.” The caption under the Dallas Cowboy said “hand egg.” Check out SpY.

I know we’re in the middle of winter here, but when my son saw his new deck with an orange top ply, the first thing he said was that it looked like a pumpkin. Grover said the same thing too, so I made it look like a pumpkin. I hadn’t really done the custom grip tape thing since the 80’s, so it was a nice project. Bonus pic after the jump.