Parkour and the City as a Playground

Years ago when I was in one the earlier years of my undergrad degree at UBC, I took a film course with a guy who seemed to be highly caffeinated at all times and would constantly be bouncing off the walls. And I mean, literally bouncing off the walls. We would be out on campus and he would take a running leap toward an inverted corner of a building and, using one side as leverage against another, run halfway up the building.

At the time, I had never heard of Parkour -- my friend called it something like "freerunning", which to me didn't entirely encapsulate the craziness of what he did -- but in the time since it has become far more popular. A Toronto chapter even offers lessons. The definition (on the American Parkour website) says that "Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one's path by adapting one's movement to the environment."

Translation: They're like monkeys released into the built environment.

They swing off bars, run up walls, jump across the chasms of buildings only to land perfectly on a narrow ledge, flip off roofs, and engage in any other number of gravity- and fear-defying acts.

Basically, Parkour is -- like street art -- a re-imagining of the urban landscape. Where graffiti and street artists use the city as a canvass or a giant installation project, the practitioners of Parkour (traceurs) use the city as one sprawling, integrated jungle gym. The movements can be so fluid that they seem connect buildings, almost knitting the city together and making it seem like a cohesive whole instead of solitary structures sitting near each other and separated by alleyways, guard rails and walls. Where I see a barrier I have to walk around, they see something that can be leaped over.

So, I guess I disagree with the last little bit of the American Parkour definition. Although it is definitely about adapting your movements to the environment, it is also about adapting the environment to your movements and that's where the real creativity of it comes in. You have to have the ability to look at architecture and see something other than a building or wall or a railing; you have to look and see the possibility of movement, which ultimately makes Parkour a pretty artistic practice as well as a physical one. Afterall, one of other names for it is l'art du déplacement, which translate as the art of movement.

Often I think we get caught up in seeing the city and our environment in a routine way, and so it's jarring and kind of exhilarating to watch someone take your assumption about what the city can be used for and shatter it. Also, it's just damn cool to watch.

First image source.

Second image source.

Photo: High Security Flower Pot

OK, I get you want to protect your flowers from the dangers of the open street, but this kind of defeats the purpose of having flowers, no?

[taken in Toronto sometime in July]

Busses you can drive beneath, super high-speed trains, Soviet-style Tetris, vertical gardens, and a fake cloud in New York

China plans to build huge busses that you can drive underneath, with construction of the first 186km track to be started at the end of the year. But wait! China's not finished yet! They're also building a maglev train that will be capable of ground speeds of up to 1000km/h. After riding the GO train to Niagara Falls from Toronto a few days ago, a 1000km/h high-speed train is almost unimaginable.

But let's say you don't really care about crazy busses and high-speed trains and are more into, oh, I don't know, building Soviet-style apartment blocks in a giant game of Tetris. Well, now you can! Or, you can at least watch a video of how it's done.

Spain has created a six-story vertical garden in the town square of San Vincente del Raspeig, which to me looks like a big green patch-work quilt thrown over a building.

Architects, NAMELESS, propose a fake cloud in New York called PlayCloud, which, in my opinion, should be renamed The Big Giant White Jellyfish.

A Yarn-Bombed Tree and Unexpected Street Art

Yesterday in Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods Park I came across this tree at the Queen St edge that had been yarn-bombed, a kind of graffiti using yarn instead of spray paint. It reminded me of those spinning tops with the pen fastened at the tip that create a kind of geometrical drawing as it spins, except this one is full of linear lines.

I also liked how it took the natural chaos of the tree and imposed something grid-like and orderly.

I sat near the tree for awhile and watched as people walking by stopped and stared at it for a second before passing. It turned the tree, briefly, into an event, a kind of temporary sculpture in the park.

This is the thing I like most about street art as opposed to art you might find when you are walking through a gallery or museum: there is a surprise factor involved with street art. When you're in an art gallery you are expecting to see capital-A Art, but not so when strolling a park or walking the streets. Street art kind of comes out of nowhere, or so it seems, and that is part of its greatness, its ability to be truly eye-catching and thought-provoking simply because we aren't expecting it.

Another aspect of street art that I love is that it is often anonymous and ephemeral. Not only do I have no idea who wrapped the yarn around the tree, but I have no idea how long it will be up there before it is removed, which gives me a greater sense of appreciation for having stumbled upon it when I did. I suppose when the notorious Banksy visited Toronto a few weeks ago, the people that found his art on the street had a similar feeling of surprise and fleetingness (much of the work was erased or defaced soon afterwards).

Finally, I love street art because it re-imagines street surfaces and parts of the city in a totally different way than we are used to experiencing them. The tree turns into a giant crotchet project; the alley wall is a canvass; a stop sign a chance for a statement; a dumpster a vehicle for a declaration of love; and, as I saw once in Vancouver, a mattress left in an alley used as a farewell.

It's a contentious issue as many of the surfaces used are private, but when thrown up on alley walls or unused surfaces and objects it can be thrilling. In a time when much of what we see in our city streets is corporate, paid-for advertising, it's refreshing to come across something truly novel and there for no other purpose than to be looked at, like a tree covered in yarn in a park.

The Dichotomy of the Don Valley & Reflections on Urban Highways

A few days ago, I rode my bike along Bloor and over the Don Valley Parkway (DVP), a wide highway that threads through the green of the Don Valley. What struck me most about my view of the highway from the pedestrian/bicycle bridge, was the marked dichotomy between the two uses of the Don Valley -- one as smooth-paved high volume six lane highway, and the other as green parkland and river.

It was the stark physical representation of past planning decisions, laid out with two visions: one a fast-flowing mechanized stream of cars, trucks and motocycles, and the other a slow-flowing stream of water through a green valley. I wonder what the area would look like if the highway was absent? It's a shame that Toronto's widest streets and highways (Lake Shore Blvd, Gardiner Expressway, the DVP) are placed exactly in the spots that severe Torontonians connection to things like the Don Valley River or Lake Ontario. It seems easy in this city to forget that water lies so close.

Originally Woodbine Avenue, the DVP fully opened in 1966 and was conceived as part of a network of highways for Toronto including the constructed Gardiner Expressway that snakes along Toronto's waterfront, and the much opposed (thank you, Jane Jacobs) and never-built Spadina Expressway that would have literally chopped Toronto in two. This was all during the era of Robert Moses, the highway builder who loved to carve cities up with ribbons of asphalt. In fact, there is an entire book written by Roberta Brandes Gratz, The Battle for Gotham, that chronicles the "fight" between Jacobs and Moses.

Lying on the grass at Riverdale Park there are three things that are noticeable. One is the fantastic view of downtown Toronto (a rare sight it seems in a city that is so flat). The second is the broad, sloping grass of the park (I will have to remember to come sledding here in winter). And the third is the constant hum and buzz of the DVP, which is noticeable just at the bottom of the park (although not in this picture).

Projects to revamp the natural side of the Don Valley, including the Don Mouth Naturalization and Port Lands Flood Project are currently under way in the city in an effort to reestablish some of the natural environment of the Don Valley that has been affected by the DVP and other waterfront developments.

In the case of the Gardiner Expressway, Waterfront Toronto has been studying options on what to do with the ugly, elevated highway, including options, as they say, of "removal, replacement, enhancement, or maintaining the status quo." Parts of the Gardiner were already removed in 2001 and 2003. Their study also include the previously mentioned Lake Shore Blvd. To me, a boulevard is meant to evoke the kind of street you'd like to stroll along, especially one with the moniker 'lake shore"; however, the actual street is a daunting, multi-lane barren strip of pavement between the city and the lake.

Other cities that went urban highway crazy during the Moses years are also wondering what to do with them. San Francisco demolished the elevated Embarcadero in the early 90s, effectively reconnecting the waterfront with the rest of the city, while Boston spent billions of dollars to bury their urban freeway underground, a construction project nicknamed The Big Dig, which has opened up a long, corridor through the city to be developed.

On the other side of things, there are city's like Vancouver, which opposed highways bisecting their city and now don't have the expensive job of demolishing or re-routing them. Vancouver did, however, start the process of building the highway with the demolishing of the black neighbourhood of Hogan's Alley and subsequent construction of the elevated Dunsmuir Viaduct -- and there is even talk in city hall about demolishing that.

But back to the pedestrian/bicycle bridge overlooking the Don Valley River and the Don Valley Parkway. It is quite humbling to peer over the edge at the cars, which seem to appear from nowhere as if they have been shot out of a cannon below the bridge. Of course, if you turn around you can see where they come from: kilometres of highway. If you close your eyes you can imagine the sound as a rushing river of rapids. But when you open them again you realize the real river is tranquil and silent and just over to the side, behind that highway fence.

Inception and the Architecture of Dreams

Yesterday I saw the film Inception, a sci-fi puzzle thriller that proposes the idea that we can go into other people's dreams (or invite them into ours), design a dream world for them that they then fill with their own subconscious meanderings, and proceed to extract information. Aside from a few stodgy lines of dialogue and some melodramatic acting, the film was fairly mind-blowing, and all the more because it dealt with the subject of architecture in the rule-free world of our dreaming mind.

Designing a dream world would be any architect or urban planners own wet dream. Not only would you be able to walk around your fully-formed designs, but you could bend physics to create twisted, paradoxical structures. It would be the ultimate form of uninhibited creation, as Ellen Page's character, a promising young architecture student, points out.

Escher's Ascending and Descending staircase is used as an example in the film, and it's a good one. What would Escher have done if he could have created the dream worlds he put to paper? If he could have had the chance to walk inside them?

[M. C. Escher, Ascending and Descending, 1960. 35.5 cm × 28.5 cm]

Just imagine: a giant game of Sim City where you are walking the streets instead of perched above with your birds-eye view. You come to a spot where a bridge would be nice, so you create one--and then watch how people use it, how it affects traffic. You keep walking and decide that instead of a skyscraper the spot should be a public plaza, so you get rid of the tower and insert the plaza, but then you notice that the buildings around the plaza mean that no sunlight will ever hit it--so you shorten them.

How would this change the way we build cities and buildings? Would we grow underwhelmed by the architectural possibilities of the real world? By the constraints of physics and material? Or would it allow more creativity, more risk-taking, simply for the fact that you could test it out before spending millions or billions of dollars to actually build the thing.

[M. C. Escher, Balcony, 1945. 55 x 65 cm]

What would architects like Buckminster Fuller, Rem Koolhaas, and Frank Gehry create if they could design a dream world without physical limitations? What kind of world would Tim Burton make? Stanley Kubrick? Stephen King? I wonder if Le Corbusier had gotten the chance to walk the streets of his Radiant City -- his towers in the park -- would he have stuck with the design?

Maybe one day 3D modelling will advance to the point where architects and planners actually have this ability to enter their creations and invite developers, government officials, citizens, and whoever else, inside that same world to give them a guided tour of what exactly they'd like to build.

I also think of the Salvador Dali Museum, still under construction in St. Petersburg, Florida. The inside of the building features a coiled staircase, like a spring pulled apart, while the outside is a concrete box being engulfed by a bulbous glass amoeba. But what would Dali himself have created, if he could use this dream-world technology to build one for himself? How wonderful and frightening and strange it would be to walk that world.

© HOK + Beck Group

Urbanized Film, Plastic Jug Planters, 21 Architectural Marvels, More Electronic Billboards?, and Fishy Frank Gehry

Gary Hustwit, director of the documentaries Helvetica and Objectified, says his next project, to complete the "Design Trilogy" will be a film titled Urbanized that will explore ideas related to urban design.

Old, plastic jugs turned decorative planters pop up in London.

Vanity Fair lists 21 architectural marvels. Expect some of the usual suspects. Rem Koolhaas makes the list three times. Canadian buildings completely absent.

John Lorinc writes about the renewal of upper Yonge Street in Toronto, featuring...more electronic billboards a la Yonge & Dundas Square?

Frank Gehry clears the air on his fishy inspiration.