viz.

Rodney Torres, 50-50 through Love Sculpture, image from Quartersnacks

Street skaters love architecture. Few people other than architects notice or appreciate the designs in concrete, marble, metal, and brick that comprise a city, but seen through a skater's eyes, lines of movement appear everywhere. Ledges, stairs, hand rails, and even (or especially) smooth concrete and marble elicit a joyful recognition of possibilities. Rather than an agglomeration of static structures, the city becomes an invitation to motion; the skater desires contact with the hard surfaces of the urban environment. Assemblage of body, board, and buildings: a intimate becoming, in love with (the) concrete.

Fred Gall, bluntslide, image from chrome ball incident

Gall slides across a wax-blackened stair rather than stepping up or down the set, reflecting a dramatic shift in perspective:

Streetskaters are the other great horde of architectural fetishists. The fetish is slightly different in aspect but not in intensity. Perspectivally, architects are generally schooled to gaze upward, and cultivate an awe of form. Skateboarders remain at eye-level, street-level, on the plane of human actions. Architects strive to behold totalities; skaters fixate, on smaller parts— they look closer, at details and textures and otherwise unremarkable typologies. Skaters are the sensualists, the kinesthetic lovers of space and form. (Skateboarding, Action, and Architecture)

Eric Koston (Skater of the Year 2006), 50-50, image from chrome ball incident

A very long, round handrail with multiple kinks requires precise balance that can distinguish and respond to every nuance of the metal:

Skateboarding lets you experience buildings not as a set of objects, designed by architects, but as a set of spatial experiences. By this I mean that moving around on a skateboard makes you consider buildings and landscapes as a set of opportunities to skate, you are constantly sizing up banks, ledges, curves, curbs and so on for their ability to be skated upon. So there is this initial process of interrogation, looking at architecture differently, working out whether it can be skated or not. And then there is the actual engagement with the architecture, using the skateboard and your body in relation to the physicality of the building, and here one appreciates architecture differently again, this time as a direct sensual engagement, less to do with the mind and more to do the living body that we all possess. (Skateboarding vs Architecture)

Image from chrome ball incident

[Skateboarding] addresses the physical architecture of the modern city, yet responds not with another object but with a dynamic presence.... It produces space, but also time and the self. Skateboarding is constantly repressed and legislated against, but counters not through negative destruction but through creativity and production of desires.... It requires a tool (the skateboard), but absorbs that tool into the body. It involves great effort, but produces no commodity ready for exchange. It is highly visual, but refutes the reduction of activity solely to the spectacle of the image. (Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space, and the City: Architecture and the Body, p. 1.)

The time-lapse image above is from a chrome ball incident post focused not on a single skater, but on a single spot. Skaters constantly seek out new spots or attempt new tricks at old spots. The ever-changing urban landscape offers opportunity one week, only to take it away the next. Some spots become legendary:

The History of Hubba Hideout

But these legends will eventually be destroyed. Skating highlights not only the possibilities of motion through space, but also the transitory nature of the most seemingly permanent of fixtures. The city is a localized phoenix; spots are constantly destroyed and created. 

Supra team riders at Lego Land, Austin DIY skate spot, image from Lunchbox Party

Something as simple as concrete slabs leaning against one another can become a hidden pleasure garden. Not content to skate only what the governments and corporations build, skaters also take it upon themselves to rework their spaces with DIY projects (Portland's Burnside skate park is the grandfather of them all) like Austin's Lego Land (above) or the now destroyed Alien Pod (below). Skaters become architects of the local, the temporary. The knowledge that the landscape always changes demands an urgency. Tomorrow might be too late:

Alien Pod (RIP), Austin DIY skate spot, image from Concrete Disciples