Free ride

Unlike most of the playgrounds and sports fields, the different spaces made for skateboarding are never abstract. The majority of current skateparks, with their mix of curves, inclines and parallelepiped volumes, synthesize the original space of the skateboard, the ocean, and its place of birth, the modern city. Accompanied by numerous documents photographic, this text is a guided tour of the spaces of the skateboard. The author draws up a sort of formal typology while constituting its archeology, devices of Galilean mechanics to the history of minimalist sculpture whose skateboarders are said to be heirs. Raphaël Zarka