Released late last year, Jonah Hill’s debut film Mid90s offers up a nostalgia-tinged exploration of skateboarders’ relationship with the urban landscape.

Jonah Hill’s recent directorial debut Mid90s offers a nice slice of nostalgia for anyone even passably involved in the skating scene in the period that gives the film its name. While the film itself isn’t especially good – several potentially important plot points are introduced and then quickly discarded as the film zips along – it’s still worth watching, if only for the chance to see a sport which will soon be represented at the Olympics being treated with such hostility by the authorities.

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Some context: skateboarders have always existed on society’s margins, mainly because of the landscapes they choose to exploit in pursuit of their craft. While there were earlier precedents, skate culture only really emerged in the late-1970s. In search of things to do when the waves weren’t breaking, young Californian surfers would swap their surfboards for skateboards and swap the ocean for asphalt, carving up the smooth wave-like curves of empty reservoirs and semi-abandoned transport infrastructure.

The drought that launched skateboarding

During the California drought of 1976-77 many of these same skateboarders discovered the potential of swimming pools and began to develop pretty efficient procedures for searching suitable suburban back gardens to break into for a couple of hours, and then draining the half empty pools with pumping apparatus before carving up the concrete bowl that was left. Out of this came a new wave of enthusiasm for the sport and a series of skate competitions, mostly taking place on purpose built vert ramps that mimicked the swimming pools.

By the mid-80s skateboarders were beginning to make another important mark on the urban landscape, moving from the vert ramp and out onto the city streets. This was fuelled by new tricks, most notably the “ollie” – in which the skateboarder lifts themselves off the ground using a combination of impact, pressure and adhesion between the skater’s foot and the board’s sandpaper surface – as well as a series of ollie-based tricks devised by pioneering freestyle skater Rodney Mullen.

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In Mullen’s wake came street skateboarders like Natas Kaupas, whose videos show the eccentric skater doing tricks off anything he could find, in the process giving street furniture a whole new range of uses: walls for riding up, handrails and benches for “sliding” and “grinding” over, and stairs to ollie off of.

In this move to the streets, skateboarders were engaging in a playful rebellion, giving new meanings to the otherwise fairly incidental and mundane features of the modern city, breathing a new life of play into spaces that are otherwise meant for working, studying or shopping.

An Urban Idyll… Before the Cops Come

This is the skateboarding we encounter in Mid90s and the film offers some great moments which convey the excitement and rebellion involved in skate culture at the time. A school serves as a vast playground for hundreds of skaters, with people not just skating but hanging out, talking, drinking, smoking and watching each other practice tricks. It’s an urban idyll, until the police rush in to arrest anyone not quick enough to run away.

This is an experience familiar to any skateboarder, and one which is also famously captured in rapper Lupe Fiasco’s 2006 song “Kick, Push”:

“They head to any place with stairs any good grinds the world was theirs
And they four wheels will take them there until the cops came and said there’s no skating here
So they kick push kick push kick push kick push coast.”

Charges of trespass, curfew and criminal damage have long limited the skater’s ability to explore and engage with the city. But more recently, their growing presence in the public realm has also led urban designers to insert deterrents to prevent them from ollieing down sets of stairs and grinding on handrails.

When watching Mid90s you can’t help but conclude that the culture it depicts is one that will never truly be tamed, either by the carrot of Olympic recognition or the stick of criminality and defensible design. But this doesn’t mean it deserves to be treated with such hostility.

Even though Russians often call Moscow the “Third Rome,” the city’s first agora appeared only in autumn 2017. Khokhlovka Square, formerly just another abandoned construction site common in Moscow and other Russian cities in the mid-1990s, was transformed into an amphitheater – the first architectural object of its kind in Moscow.

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The public space has become an all-weather space and groundbreaking open-air museum, combining contemporary design with an archeological segment of a 16th-century fortification wall. Today it is a must-see destination in the Russian capital: within a year, the number of user-submitted photographs featuring it on social media grew 15 times.

Abandoned for nearly a decade

Located on a busy part of Moscow’s historic Boulevard Ring at the intersection with Pokrovka Street, Khokhlovka Square was slated to become an underground parking lot, but work was halted in 2007 after a surprising archeological find: a segment of the 16th-century White Town fortification wall, marking the border of medieval Moscow. The site was abandoned for nearly a decade. It was also a major obstacle for pedestrians walking along the Boulevard Ring.

The space got a new lease on life when Strelka KB, Russia’s largest urban consultancy, proposed turning the site into a public space to the Moscow City Government, with an amphitheater that would showcase the White Town wall section. The project was organized as part of the Moscow Street program, a large scale initiative to create a safer, more livable Moscow through revamping streets and public spaces. The square was developed by Strelka KB in collaboration with the landscape architecture studio Djao-Rakitine and in 2018 was recognized with the Moscow Urban Forum Community Award in the Urban Design category.

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A sense of privacy and intimacy

From an architectural perspective, Khokhlovka Square descends several meters below street level to the fragment of the White Town wall. Behind the 16th-century fortification is an architectural concrete wall covered by Virginia creeper vines, serving both as a protective structural element and a contrasting background for the light stone monument. The eco-friendly water-permeable paving system used at the base of the amphitheater helps absorb rainwater, along with a system of collection grates that redirect rainwater away from the surface and strengthen the amphitheater’s foundation. Meanwhile, the base of the amphitheater offers a flexible open space, and the steps leading to it feature wood planking, allowing them to be used as seats in any weather. The steps leading down to it create an accessible approach, with a ramp suitable for users of varying levels of mobility, and together with several large trees planted around the perimeter, they give a sense of privacy and intimacy, offering shade and shelter from sun, wind, and passing cars.

Round-the-clock point of attraction

The site’s popularity after reconstruction was measured by Strelka KB’s Center for Urban Anthropology. Whereas street activity was minimal due to the abandoned construction site, in the twelve months following reconstruction the percentage of photos taken on the street increased from 28% to 45%, and data shows a wide variety of activities in the amphitheater itself, from picnics to outdoor sports. Most importantly, the area became a round-the-clock point of attraction: whereas the Pokrovka Street area was once best known for its nightlife, it is now a daytime destination as well, with the percentage of photos taken during the daylight hours nearly doubling. The increased foot traffic fostered the opening of trendy new spots, including one of the most popular pizzerias in the city.

Thoughtful preservation

Almost three years ago the German landscape architecture office “Planergruppe Oberhausen” in cooperation with B.A.S. Kopperschmidt & Moczalla realized the innovative open space project “Landscape Therapeutic Park” in the forests of the German city of Brilon. The project includes a spa park, a forest park and a therapeutic walking loop spanning an area of 4.5 hectares. We spoke with the responsible landscape architect Ute Aufmkolk (Planergruppe Oberhausen) about the importance and potential of open spaces such as these.

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Let us begin with a brief overview of the project: It is surrounded by an open, gentle meadow valley and wooded, steep forest slopes in a characteristic way. The aim of the design is to highlight precisely this contrast. The spa park (“Kurpark”) is centrally located and includes direct access to a lake. It is surrounded by flat, blooming meadowlands featuring a barefoot trail and a beekeeper’s hive. In contrast to the wide meadows, the forest park (“Waldpark”) functions as its “introvert counterpoint”.
The highlight of the forest park is the „therapeutic walking loop“. Thirteen stations are associated with human moods such as clarity, overview, openness, harmony, confusion, attentiveness, contemplation, transparency and sublimity. A landscape window (“Landschaftsfenster”) serves as a prelude to the loop. A wooden grotto bridge (“Grottensteg”) leads visitors past mystical caves and rock formations. Accompanied by the “fairy sounds” of an audio installation (“Feenklang”), the loop leads to five stances featuring a signature red paint finish. The view becomes even more impressive: the landscape architects transformed a former ski jump into a spectacular viewpoint including a swing. Passing a vitalizing re-naturalized spring, visitors reach the path-spider (“Wegespinne”). This is a place for resting or contemplating the loop’s many twists and turns. The loop continues through a dense forest, past a red shimmering fairy wreath (“Feenkranz”) and a poet’s clearing (“Dichterlichtung”), perfect for deep thought and reflection. Comfortable hammocks invite visitors to rest their tired legs at the end of an inspiring hike.

In your previous work you dedicate yourselves to different ways of making open space useable. What does open space mean to you, and how does this influence your planning and design practice?
For the Brilon project, open space certainly means something different than in the high density built environment of a city. In a city, open space means everything that isn’t covered by a building. In the case of the “Landscape Therapeutic Park” we rather have a form of landscape reaching into the city. For Brilon, landscape means the forest, the steep hills densely covered by spruce trees. For the project, the transition from the open space in the valley and the spa park with its garden-like design to the dark, shadowy forest is important. Emphasizing that contrast is central to this particular project. This matches our understanding of all our projects: to identify the parameters of each individual place that define its form and function.

What potential, what opportunity for development does the project offer?
When the project began, Brilon suffered from the impact of Cyclone Kyrill, which caused significant damages to the forests in the Sauerland region in 2007. There were numerous “memorials” consisting of felled tree trunks, upturned rootstocks and so forth, reminiscent of the cyclone’s impact. We tried to leave the destructive impact behind us and instead, revive the poetic quality of the forest. The design comprises a sensitive response to its immediate surrounding.

Which existing elements fascinated you in particular while working on this project, and how were they integrated into the design?
There was a deserted ski jump in the forest. It had already ceased operations in the 1970s. However, the forest aisle, the jump-off platform, and the referee’s building were still visible. We included the ski jump into our design in form of two separate stations within the landscape therapeutic path. At the starting position, we situated an over-sized swing that is supposed to allow visitors to experience the moment of jumping. At the jump-off area there is a small lookout platform with outward-leaning guard rails and an inscription: “fly!” In the original design, our collaboration partners B.A.S. intended to make the referee tower accessible and use it as a “library of things”. However, this beautiful idea had to be omitted from the finished project due to costs and safety concerns.

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The project subtitle is “Landscape Therapeutic Park”. In your view, what is the potential of landscape architecture to influence how people feel?
Perhaps less landscape architecture as such, and rather the experience of landscape. That was the lead that we followed in our design – how, where and in which instances can the view of a landscape touch us, emotionally? How can we create images that produce a certain feeling and appeal to our emotional well-being? We intended to achieve this by referring to the places that we found on-site and that already possessed a particular atmospheric quality. Through our landscape architectural interventions we intended to reinforce and dramatize them. As a result, I think that walking and hiking through the park and the forest, passing the various stations that produce feelings such as clarity, overview, openness, harmony, confusion, attentiveness, transparency and sublimity indeed have a positive effect on people’s well-being. The forest as such already has a therapeutic function, as science has recently proven.

Which were the greatest challenges you had to master for this project?
The greatest challenge in terms of planning was to formulate a unifying theme and create a connection between the individual objects that are distributed across the forest, far apart from each other. The technical challenge was that there was no standard, off-the-shelf solution for any of these objects. Instead, every solution is tailor-made, designed by us. For example, the “fairy ring” consists of fluorescent acrylic glass with a diameter of 5 meters that floats four meters above the hiking trail – suspended by the surrounding trees. Supervising the construction process wasn’t easy, because the stations were distributed far apart from each other in terrain that was often difficult to navigate. Each one of the thirteen stations of the “therapeutic pathway” have an individual character and are site-specific. An audible experience is provided by the “fairy sounds” installation.

What is the story behind the “forest fairy of Brilon”?
No other city in Germany is surrounded by more forest than Brilon. Since 2004 and as a tourist attraction, Brilon biannually nominates a young woman who lives in the city as “forest fairy” – similar to the wine queens typical for German wine producing towns. We think that the forest fairy is a very poetic idea and wanted her to appear at one of our stations. For this purpose, we proposed an audio installation that is supposed to symbolize the fly-by of the fairy as a mythical forest dweller. Beyond the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves of trees, visitors can hear her delicate fairy sounds.