The new Oslo Opera House is much more than a temple to the vocal arts. It's a palace of thrash, with as many gnarly facets as the best skate parks.
For years, architects have gone to great lengths to protect their buildings from marauding skaters. But as aesthetic trends move toward folded planes that transition seamlessly from wall to ceiling and back to wall, designers have been looking to their former adversaries for a lesson in flow.
“We have this fascination with buildings becoming topography," says Alejandro Zaera-Polo, a partner at London's Foreign Office Architects, “and skateboarders have that physical experience." So for a park in Barcelona, his firm extended paving stones up the sides of small hillsto shield vegetation from salty sea breezes. At least that's what it told city officials. But skaters got the message. The resulting quarter-pipe landed on the March 2006 cover of Transworld Skateboarding.
Architect Zaha Hadid shares the love. She wanted her Phaeno Science Center in Germany to be an all-inclusive venue for pedestrians and skateboarders alike. Liability issues prevented skate-park designationthough you'd never guess it from the YouTube videos of pro skaters “visiting" the museum. “We design spaces that are flowing and continuous, andjust by coincidenceskateboarders look for that kind of continuity," Dillon Lin, an architect (and skater) at Hadid's firm, says with a wink.
And though the new Oslo Opera House was inspired by the image of two glaciers colliding, the architects at Snhetta didn't call on glaciologists to help fine-tune the details. They enlisted real experts in twisted planes: skateboarders. “We spoke to them about surface textures and the areas they prefer," architect Simon Ewings says. His firm followed up the conversation with a statement in stone.
Snhetta used different finishes of marble to guide skaters looking for rideable surfaces. Acoustically sensitive parts, like above the auditorium, got rough marble that's unpleasant to wheel over. But other areas silently beckon skaters. Surfaces rise up all over the place to become ledges, curbs, and bencheslike the jagged facets of a glacier (or skate park). One particularly tempting spot is a 3-foot-wide railing of smooth stone. Snhetta architect Peter Dang is, ahem, absolutely sure it's skatable. “Just make sure to fall toward the inside," he advises.
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