’︁Things that People Cannot Anticipate’: Skateboarding at the Southbank Centre: Fid-Bau Portal

’︁Things that People Cannot Anticipate’: Skateboarding at the Southbank Centre

Borden, Iain

The radical architecture group Archigram believed in modern architecture as an exciting part of how people live their lives. For Archigram, this was not architecture as sterile glass‐and‐steel office buildings, as dreary Welfare State hospitals and schools designed by faceless committees, but as something full of the mobile, changing, popular and dynamic culture of groovy 1960s life. It was architecture as part of living, breathing, happening urban life, and it was meant to be open to everyone. It was Archigram's ideas therefore which led to the meandering high‐level walkways and open‐sided ground‐level spaces (‘Undercroft’) of the Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room in London – what is now sometimes called the Festival Wing at the north end of the arts‐focused Southbank Centre. In particular, and importantly for skateboarding, there was a strong suggestion that some spaces of the Festival Wing should not be overtly prescribed for particular people or activities, but rather be left open for unpredictable and unknown uses. As Adrian Forty comments, this was a ‘great idea’ – thinking of architecture as being ‘populated with all sorts of activities’ and that ‘things that people cannot anticipate’ will ‘happen around the building’. Consequently, when skateboarding came along in the mid‐1970s, it fulfilled this architectural promise, providing exactly the sort of unexpected eruption of creativity for which the architects had hoped.