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Thursday, April 10, 2008
Apparently Landscape Architecture Magazine will be covering the urban phenomenon known as parkour in a future issue. But they need some help.
In an email to the LARCH-L, editor-in-chief Bill Thompson writes:
LAM is still trying to find information about a Parkours article. We are now trying to establish a good LA connection to the sport.
-LA s who have designed parks or who manage parks where Parkours is practiced
-LA s who have thoughts or theories about Parkours as a social phenomenon whom we could interview
-LA s who do Parkours.
Please get in touch if you know any of the above.
You can contact Bill Thompson via bthompson@asla.org.
We've been intermittently tracking parkour for years now, so we're genuinely curious to find out who will answer the call and what “LA connection to the sport” the mothership will come up with.
Will we read in a few months' time of a registered landscape architect designing public spaces that are conducive to such high-octane urban exploration? Could this be an un-ironic attempt at injecting vitality into the built environment or just another lame attempt at co-opting subculture elements, distilling and making them palatable to the New Bourgeois of the New Condominiumed City?
Or is this RLA really working with municipal bureaucrats and private developers to specify time-saver anti-parkour construction standards and details, similar to anti-skateboarding strategies and anti-teen sonic devices?
Will we read instead about an RLA working as a research fellow with the Mayo Clinic to create a new city — a carbon-netural, car-free model city in the middle of the Arabian Desert — wherein pedestrians can only navigate through aerobic and anaerobic traceries, thus helping to eradicate obesity?
Or will we read about a landscape architect, registered or otherwise, collaborating with NASA scientists to design new landscapes for Mars or in other extraterrestrial locales by studying the aerial acrobatics of parkour devotees?
Will a studio tutor come forward and admit that he's been requiring students to perform hours of parkour at their project site, broken bones, bloody scrapes and litigous parents be damned?
Perhaps Bill Thompson will discover that one of his regular contributors had done a similar kind of site reading to better inform his critique of Martha Schwartz's new plaza or a new post-industrial heritage park by Peter Latz?
Or — woe upon woe — no one comes forward and we are all left wondering if the field of landscape architecture is truly dominated by residential design and thus is duplicitous in runaway urban sprawl, natural habitat destruction and the continuing mortgage crisis?
In any case, what exactly is parkour? An article published in The New Yorker almost exactly one year ago begins thus:
Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. Spread mainly by videos on the Internet, it has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill seekers and martial-arts adepts, who regard it as part extreme sport—its founder would like to see it included in the Olympics—and part gruelling meditative pursuit. Movies like its daredevil qualities. A bracing parkour chase begins “Casino Royale,” the recent James Bond movie. It includes jumps from the boom of one tower crane to that of another, but parkour’s customary obstacles are walls, stairwells, fences, railings, and gaps between roofs—it is an urban rather than a pastoral pursuit. The movements are performed at a dead run. The more efficient and fluid the path they define, and the more difficult and harrowing the terrain they cross, the more elegant the performance is considered by the discipline’s practitioners.
Feeling a bit indulgent, here's another very long quote, as found in Space and Culture:
Traceurs unanimously agree that PK changes their perception of space and the world around them. Viscerally they describe it as if the three dimensional landscape were being flattened out. Or sometimes as if they were able to see a two dimensional world with occasional three dimensional aspects - would-be obstacles that, instead of restricting movement, are now used to escape - mockingly — the confines of the flat landscape. If this sounds confusing to a non or newbie Traceur, start by allowing your eyes to travel across the landscape of Relativity by M. C. Escher. PK transforms the entire urban environment into Escher inspired paths where stairwells become ceiling, railings become steps, and walls become walkways. Traceurs move about in a world loosely defined by a Non-Euclidean Geometry where the shortest distance between two points is a great arc or a Parkour Cat Leap. That’s not vertigo you’re feeling. That’s the Flow. It’s a quick revision for the average Traceur to translate this into a creed for everyday living - there are no obstacles in life, only opportunities.
More fantastic photos by Jon Lucas of Daniel Ilabaca in this Flickr photoset. And if you want to know more about Ilabaca, you can watch him in the documentary video Parkour Journeys.
