From time to time, in addition to writing about architects, buildings, cities, and the people who live in them, I get opportunities to write about other things that I love a lot, like skateboarding, movies, and art. Two years ago, I had the distinct honor of writing an essay for my friend and artist Amir Zaki. It appears in his wonderful book, California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks,1, which I highly recommend. In his book, the other essay is by the greatest skater of all time Tony Hawk, who founded The Skatepark Project. It builds skateparks for underserved communities creating safe and inclusive public skateparks for youths.
I have added images that do not appear with my essay in the book. At some point in the future, I will post a movie review that I wrote for a French journal about the skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. I need to scan it and translate it into English from French since I have misplaced the original or post it in French and English.
The essay is long, so I am breaking it into two parts.2 If this first half does end up getting truncated by Gmail, do click through to my Substack page for the full text.
Badlands and Good Architecture, Part 1
The middle year of the 1970s, a decade that opened at the near-end of a turbulent cultural revolution in the United States and closed with the beginning of another one over half a world away, was a pivotal year for modern skateboarding and contemporary American landscape photography. More than four decades later, those events—sea changes in the practice of skateboarding and photography—now intersect in a new body of work by Amir Zaki, photographs of skateparks across suburban California.
1975: The New Topographics
In October 1975, an exhibition curated by William Jenkins, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man- Altered Landscape, opened at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Jenkins, the museum’s Curator of Twentieth-Century Photography, had seized upon and then promoted a key insight: that contemporary photographers (specifically, the Americans Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr., as well as the German partnership of Bernd and Hilla Becher) had turned their lenses away from traditional—that is, natural—landscapes, and refocused their vision toward the kinds of brand-new, dying, or dead, built “topographies” that had come to define large parts of the United States and Europe in the decades after the Second World War.
Capturing this anti-Arcadian landscape in often deadpan, scientific, and/or self-consciously amateur styles, these photographers also went about reframing their practice in light of then-recent Conceptual art practices such as seriality, dullness, and automatic art, as developed by Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. The results were nothing less than startling. As these new “topographers” opened photography to typological documentations of both the banal and the beautiful—whether emerging suburban tracts in Southern California (Joe Deal) or dead Pennsylvania industrial landscapes (the Bechers)—it became apparent that landscape photography had been deemed worthy of critical attention by both the academic milieu and the art world. The New Topographics style also intentionally distanced itself from a powerful street photography tradition, which often focused on human figures navigating bustling, highly populated urban areas. By shifting their visual attention to the apparent emptiness and frequent bleakness of the suburbs and the more expansive West, the New Topographics photographers were tapping into a certain cultural ennui and a potential to cultivate a poetics of the banal and the underpopulated. (As I will discuss further, these qualities and conditions would also prove crucial for the invention and evolution of modern skateboarding.)
By reframing the postindustrial landscape and its otherness, leaving behind notions of the bucolic and the spiritual (including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s Transcendentalism) that had defined landscape photography for more than a century and landscape painting for centuries before that, contemporary photography had swapped the organic for the hypernatural. Previously an innocent naturalist, the artist was now a complicit yet acutely observant participant in an entropic landscape. Instead of capturing nature’s unspoiled divinity, landscape photography had become a means to extend and test Conceptual art practices, which centered on ideas rather than techniques. The work was influenced partly by Walker Evans’s prewar Social Realism and Andy Warhol’s postwar Pop pluralism.
Ed Ruscha, an artist who arrived in California via Nebraska and Oklahoma, was also an important figure. The New Topographics catalog referenced his seminal pamphleteer studies of the mid-century Los Angeles automotive landscape—including Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip—which he had begun to produce in the mid-1960s. American architecture, commercialism, and banality had also been refigured in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a then-controversial study of the Vegas Strip by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.
A quarter-century after the New Topographics show, its influence was apparent in the more cinematic fin-de-siècle efforts of the German artists (former students of the Bechers) Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff. Later, and perhaps more subtly, the exhibition also impacted the work of such photographers as Amir Zaki, Florian Maier-Aichen, Catherine Opie, and Karin Apollonia Müller.
1975: The Z-Boys and the birth of vertical skateboarding
Across the country, in Dogtown (Santa Monica, California), 1975 was Year Zero for modern skateboarding. When the waves died down after a winter of huge storms that had pummeled the region, Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom, and Craig (C.R.) Stecyk, the Zephyr surfboard shop owners, agreed to sponsor a group of local teenage and pre-teenage boys taking part in a series of skateboarding competitions along the Southern California coast. Those boys—the late Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, and later others—would become recognized locally, then nationally, and eventually internationally as the Zephyr Skate Team, better known today as the Z-Boys (compellingly dramatized by Peralta in 2005 in the movie Lords of Dogtown, directed by Catherine Hardwicke).
Dogtown’s infamous Z-Boys brought an authentic punk and experimental athleticism to the staid world of competitive skateboarding. And, perhaps by accident, they more or less invented modern vertical skateboarding, which is now a state-of-the-art, multibillion-dollar lifestyle industry, practiced from Shanghai to Berlin and from Melbourne to Reykjavik. As an unintended consequence, they also spurred the creation, evolution, and proliferation of the sorts of purpose-built concrete skateparks that are the subject of Amir Zaki’s photographs.
Following a winter of storms so brutal that excess water pressure in the Los Angeles drainage system forced 200-pound maintenance hole covers out of city streets, the summer of 1975, somewhat unbelievably, saw the continuation of the droughts that marked the mid-1970s across Southern California. Many Angelenos drained their backyard swimming pools to save water. By the middle of that summer, the L-shaped ranch homes built in the 1950s for children of the Atomic Age across West LA and the San Fernando Valley were empty. Between each home’s rear fence and the sliding doors that opened onto the backyard, a strange, smoothly finished, and organic-shaped void, between 8 and 12 feet deep, lay open to the heavens, waiting to be filled again with water … or to find some other use. There, in those denatured suburban icons— real-estate loss leaders that were meant to act as backdrops for an emerging postwar leisure class and which later in the 1970s served as the prelude spaces to the boudoir for the swinging lifestyle—something totally unpredictable emerged. Ludicrously or miraculously, or both, the Z-Boys had the insight, or perhaps the genius, to attempt to skateboard inside the water-free kidney-shaped bowls. And thus, these upper-school delinquents and social misfits gave birth to “vertical” skateboarding—that is, skating not conducted horizontally or downhill on the street, which was the only tradition at the time.
These surfers, desperate to surf but without surf during LA’s summer doldrums, discovered that the act of carving along the smooth contours and gradual radiuses that were quintessential elements of plaster swimming- pool design just so happened to closely mimic the feeling of surfing on the ocean’s waves. The apparently dysfunctional and sad empty vessels became ideal, reliable surrogates for the volatile ocean conditions. Out from under the intersection of hand-laminated plywood decks, urethane wheels, aluminum trucks, and that hard, plastered smoothness came to the invention of a new sport that would bridge all sorts of topographies, from the ocean to schoolyard berms, to industrial culverts and eventually to the first bespoke skateparks.
Less than a year after this monumental discovery, the Carlsbad Skatepark in San Diego, California, and Skateboard City in Port Orange, Florida, were opened to the public. The first of their kind, these concrete skateparks were the forerunners of recreational, “design- engineered” athletic landscapes purpose-built for skateboarding in municipal parks and private malls, like those that Zaki has photographed here. Today there are thousands of skateparks across the globe. Simulating and extending skateboarding’s initial found landscapes, contemporary skateparks are made of complex and supple concrete interweavings of bowls, full pipes, half-pipes, quarter-pipes, ramps, pyramids, snake runs, cradles, tombstones, kidneys, hips, spines, and other geometric or organic forms meant to challenge and delight modern skateboarders.
Amir Zaki’s photographs of California skateparks sit smartly at the nexus of these two events, now historical—the emergence and evolution of the modern skatepark and the reinvention of American landscape photography. Published here collectively for the first time, Zaki’s remarkable images depict the skateparks emptied of their users and made strangely supernatural by way of digital tooling and adept use of light.
Aside from my love of art and Amir’s interest in architecture, what connects us is that we both grew up skating and surfing in Southern California. These days we still both surf, and I try to skate sometimes without injuring myself.
Part 2 will be posted this Friday, February 26th.