Speaking the city: Skateboarding subculture and recompositions of the urban realm

Abstract

Architecture offers itself to us as an object and the city to us as the ultimate technical object: the fantastical concentration of wealth, power, blood, and tears crystallized in office towers, roads, houses, blocks, and open spaces. The appearance of the urban is, then, seemingly that of a thing, a finite set of spaces--it is alternatively the machine, the artefact, the body, the experiment, the artwork, the reflective mirror, the clothing, the labyrinth, and all the other metaphorical understandings by which people have sought to comprehend its objectival character. But architecture is no object. At an interdisciplinary nexus, as an intrinsic element of everyday life, architecture is not composed of isolated and monumental objects. Architecture is ambient and atmospheric, and architecture allows us to tell