SPEAKER_11: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When people ask us where we get our stories from, the answer is usually hard to pin down. It could be something one of us noticed walking around, or something a friend mentioned, or some forwarded link on Twitter. It's nearly impossible to say where inspiration comes from, in any art form. It's a long way from the seed of an idea to its execution. The brilliant architect Alvar Aalto put it very well in an extended metaphor about a fish in a stream. He wrote, Architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology. Perhaps they are, for instance, like some big salmon or trout. They are not born fully grown. They are not even born in the sea or water where they normally live. They are born hundreds of miles away from their home grounds, where the rivers narrow to tiny streams. Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to mature into a fully grown fish, so we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in our world of ideas. This is a story about one idea born hundreds of miles away in a far off stream. An idea that would travel from Northern Europe to Southern California, where it would take on a whole new life before making its way back again. It's a story in three parts by producer Avery Truffleman. First one, California.
SPEAKER_11: Two skaters in a plaza are confronted by a guard.
SPEAKER_09: Can't skate here? Nope. Oh man, it looks so good.
SPEAKER_04: Just one broken leg please.
SPEAKER_05: It's kind of a pity that skateboarding is banned in so many places, because skateboarders appreciate the small details of architecture more than anyone. They recognize the quality of concrete, the grain of wood, the incline of a structure. They recognize the way a landscape flows. May I ask you to start by introducing yourself?
SPEAKER_04: My name is Jake Phelps, I'm the editor of Thrasher magazine from San Francisco, California, born and raised. Yeah? What do you got?
SPEAKER_05: Thrasher is a skateboarding magazine that skaters call the Bible. Visiting its headquarters is kind of surreal. It's like if you went to a skate park and yelled out to all the punks, hey, you guys want to go hang out in an office? They're all there in sneakers and beanie caps slumped behind monitors like caged animals. You can tell they'd rather be skating.
SPEAKER_04: I'm a skater, I dress like a skater. These are the costumes I've been running all my life. I don't wear f***ing Louis Vuitton clothes and s***. I mean, I wear sneakers. This is the way it is. We're utilitarian. We skate. It's the greatest thing in the world.
SPEAKER_05: Jake Phelps is 55 years old, tattoos all over his arms, big thick glasses over his face, and close-cropped gray hair. He blatantly hits on me in the interview and invites me to his punk band's show over the weekend. I don't think he'd mind that I told you that.
SPEAKER_04: Skateboarding never says no. Girlfriends, jobs, life, people always say, no, I can't do that. I've been doing this for 40 years, you can't tell me I can't do it. F*** you. Stay the f*** away from me. Skateboarding is, you know, it's like an extension of me. It's like, it's an art. It's something you have to understand.
SPEAKER_05: So what is, where does the artistry come in?
SPEAKER_04: It's your whole joie de vivre, how you hold yourself.
SPEAKER_05: And that joie de vivre, that sort of badass devil-may-care attitude that skaters have perfected, that's kind of funny because skateboarding was pretty dorky back when it was just getting started.
SPEAKER_10: The very first skateboard was called the skateboard scooter, and it was a scooter.
SPEAKER_05: This is Stacey Peralta, skateboarding pioneer and director of the excellent documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which is all about the birth of modern skateboarding. Stacey says at some point, no one really knows when, but someone knocked the handlebars off the scooter and just rode the board.
SPEAKER_10: And probably emulated surfing. And so what happened was skateboarding had a very, very brief appearance in 1964 and 65.
SPEAKER_05: Skateboards were sold in toy stores and skateboarding briefly became a fad. But then as quickly as it started, it died out again.
SPEAKER_10: It was like the hula hoop. It has come and gone.
SPEAKER_05: As the skateboard fad was receding into the distance, Stacey was growing up in Venice Beach, California. It was the early seventies and Stacey was a little surf rat with long blonde hair. And when the waves were bad in the middle of the day, he and his friends wanted something to do.
SPEAKER_10: What we really wanted to do was emulate surfing.
SPEAKER_05: They wanted to surf on land, and they discovered old skateboards.
SPEAKER_10: One of my friends, his older brothers had skateboarded in the very early sixties and they had two skateboards left in their garage that they never touched. So we started riding those boards.
SPEAKER_05: Those early skateboards had these hard clunky wheels made out of clay or steel. So you'd eat dirt if you ran over a pebble or a penny on the ground. And that meant tricks had to be very simple, like I can stand up straight or I can balance on the tip of the board. Maybe a wheelie. You could just kind of scoot back and forth on a flat, smooth surface.
SPEAKER_10: It's flat land tricks. That's basically what you could do.
SPEAKER_05: Stacey was really young, like maybe seven years old. But he can remember skating for the first time. Even with those big clunky clay wheels, little Stacey found a blissful stillness.
SPEAKER_10: It was so profound that from that point forward, I needed to get back on that board and find that stillness because I'm more relaxed when I stand on a skateboard than I am when I walk.
SPEAKER_05: But Stacey and his friends were discovering skateboards while the rest of the country was forgetting them. Stacey had that old board he'd unearthed in his friend's garage.
SPEAKER_10: But after I wore that out, there was no more boards that I could buy in stores. You couldn't buy a skateboard back then.
SPEAKER_05: So instead, Stacey and his friends would go to a thrift store and buy a pair of roller skates, which had clay or metal or hard plastic wheels. And maybe Stacey would take the left skate and his friend would take the right skate and they'd cut the bases off the wheels and put them on a plank of wood and then ride that back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth for hours.
SPEAKER_10: And the hours that we spent doing it would be equivalent to a kid today, you know, jumping up and down for eight hours on a pogo stick, you know, every single day, seven days a week. You'd probably go, geez, maybe we should tell this kid that there's no future in this.
SPEAKER_05: Then in the early 70s, an invention comes along that would revolutionize skateboarding. The urethane wheel. This soft plastic wheel had more give to it and held the ground, unlike those clunky, dangerous clay wheels that preceded it. These soft wheels were intended for roller skaters at the dawn of the roller disco era. But a small company called Creative Urethanes began producing urethane wheels specifically for skateboards. Put the board together back there and then I'll put the wheels on up here.
SPEAKER_05: The wheels were sold at surf shops since there were no skate shops and they were advertised in Surfer Magazine. 58, 46 altogether.
SPEAKER_09: And in the summer of 1974, sales of urethane wheels went gangbusters.
SPEAKER_10: Suddenly we had a wheel that could grip and it could roll over bumps and little rocks and it allowed us to attack terrain that previously we were not able to attack.
SPEAKER_05: Now they could skate all surfaces. Greater Los Angeles was theirs to claim.
SPEAKER_10: And so that meant school yards, that meant in garages, city buildings, it was any place. Anything was rideable. But none of this was designed for us. None of it.
SPEAKER_05: These young kids were jumping fences and trespassing and breaking things all in search of new surfaces to ride. They were reinterpreting the city around them, finding the beauty in the pavement and the concrete of their world. And then in the mid-70s, there was a drought in California.
SPEAKER_00: In Southern California, the driest part of the state, there have been dozens of brush fires. Some have been big and expensive and more fires were threatened as Californians pray for rain. And right now, forecasters say none is expected.
SPEAKER_10: The drought was so bad in the 70s that the water company ran billboard ads that encouraged couples to shower together to save water.
SPEAKER_05: And to further save water, people didn't fill up their swimming pools. And in Los Angeles, there are a lot of swimming pools and they're very distinctive looking.
SPEAKER_10: What we had in Los Angeles is we had the big, beautiful, voluptuous shapes that you did not see anywhere else in the world that you find in Los Angeles, except in very, very, very, very small quantities.
SPEAKER_05: The pools of Los Angeles are shaped like peanuts, like keyholes, like kidney beans. They have these curved, undulating edges. They're paved in even smooth concrete with gently varying rounded depths that slope back up to the lip. And during the drought in the 70s, they were all empty. They were perfect.
SPEAKER_10: They just were so beautifully conceived and designed and we fell in love with the shapes.
SPEAKER_05: Stacey and his friends would hunt for pools. They'd find a house under construction or patrol the fancy parts of town where they knew they'd find the most sumptuous, luxurious pools. Tony! They'd hop the fence, they'd break in. Well, bail, we'll lift it up to you guys. If there's a little bit of old dirty water in the pool, they'd drain it out themselves with buckets they brought or trash cans they found. Or eventually, they'd bring an industrial vacuum along with them. And then they would skate up and down in the pool. They'd go so fast they could go up the wall. They could skate like they were surfing a wave.
SPEAKER_10: When we finally got to ride swimming pools and feel weightless, like going up a vertical wall, weightlessness is pretty extraordinary.
SPEAKER_05: Skateboarding became a form of choreography, where you're trying to do as much as possible in the limited space of the pool and look graceful while doing it.
SPEAKER_10: Here we were a bunch of scruffy kids, and here we are riding in backyard pools, and we know what we're doing is beautiful, and we get to feel beautiful.
SPEAKER_05: And this beauty attracted attention. Back in the first wave of skateboarding in the early 60s, there had been a magazine called, simply, Skateboarder. It went out of business when the skateboarding fad died out. But in the mid 70s, the magazine came back, and it featured Stacey and his friends riding in backyard pools.
SPEAKER_10: At that point, every kid in America and all over the world wanted to get inside a swimming pool. That was it. That was the holy grail. And so the drought really acted as a wonderful midwife to the skateboarding revolution.
SPEAKER_05: Eventually, Stacey and the other skateboarders got so good at pool skating, they were able to skate up over the edge of the pool. They could kind of jump up, up in the air, and maybe do a spin or something before dropping back into the pool. And these aerial tricks led to another genre of skateboarding.
SPEAKER_10: So style became less important, and extreme maneuvers became more important.
SPEAKER_05: Aerial tricks paved the way for the X Games, Half Pipes, and Tony Hawk. This whole chapter of the sport where skaters were trying to vault themselves really, really high up in the air. And that can all be traced back to the rounded, biomorphic pools of Los Angeles. The ones shaped like peanuts, and keyholes, and kidney beans.
SPEAKER_10: LA was the backyard pool mecca. But not just the backyard pool mecca, the properly, beautifully designed backyard pool. And I don't know of any place in the world that has that proliferation of that kind of voluptuous, sensuous design.
SPEAKER_05: The pools of Southern California and their proliferation led to the proliferation of skating.
SPEAKER_04: More people are skateboarding now than ever. It's a seven billion dollar industry, god damn.
SPEAKER_05: That's Jake Phelps at Thrasher again.
SPEAKER_04: People are skating pools every day. People are skating right now. Somebody just broke their arm in a pool right now. Trust me.
SPEAKER_11: And the pools of California bring us to our next chapter.
SPEAKER_05: Do you know the story about where the bean shaped pool comes from?
SPEAKER_04: The bean shape? What's the bean shape? I don't know. The right-handed kidney?
SPEAKER_05: Is that what it's called?
SPEAKER_04: I don't know. You don't call it a bean shape? I don't know. Well, it's a, I mean, obviously it would be some esoteric design to someone's backyard. Well, Jake Phelps doesn't have to be all like that about it, but he's right.
SPEAKER_11: It starts with one esoteric design in someone's backyard. But it might be the most famous private backyard in 20th century American history. Part Two. Sonoma. On top of a remote hill in Sonoma County in Northern California, at the end of a long curvy dirt road, a car pulls into a driveway. Three small dogs rush out to meet Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_03: Hi. So you got a little lost. Sorry, we overshot it a little bit.
SPEAKER_05: A little? Sounds like it. Justin Faggioli and Sandy Donnell are the owners and caretakers of this property, which is known as the Donnell Garden. It's really famous in the world of landscape architecture. But if you want to visit it, it's kind of a challenge. You can't find it on Google Maps. That address is wrong. And there aren't any public listings or sites with contact information for it. Because it's just a private home. A modest-sized, retro-modern looking house on a hill. It was Sandy's parents' place.
SPEAKER_02: I grew up on the Donnell Ranch property, born in 1951, the youngest of three children.
SPEAKER_05: The Donnell Garden was planted in 1948. And it was revolutionary at the time. Traditional gardens of the early 20th century had been more or less symmetrical rows of different kinds of flowers. They were kind of like plant museums. Maybe accented with a geometric hedge or a fruit tree. The Donnell Garden is nothing like that. It's mostly lawn.
SPEAKER_03: The lawn is a unifying feature. It meanders through everything and it becomes the river, the green river that goes from space to space.
SPEAKER_05: The garden looks like a sea of clean-cut grass, with floating islands of tropical plant clusters or groups of rocks and a few ancient oak trees. And there are large swaths of concrete and a big wooden deck. From above, the garden is almost like a Matisse collage, an arrangement of abstract shapes on a green grass canvas. And the most distinctive shape, of course, is the pool. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_03: Here's the object of your search. A kidney pool. This, from what we know, was the first kidney-shaped pool in California.
SPEAKER_05: It's every bit as beautiful as I thought, actually.
SPEAKER_05: It is bright, pristine, electric blue. And in the center of the pool is an abstract sculpture by Adeline Kent, which has two holes through it, one above water and one below. And you can swim through the holes in the sculpture like a dolphin and it's insanely fun. I know, because I tried it. The pool overlooks acres of dusty ranching property. You can hear the hum of cars on a racetrack off in the distance. And you can see the hodgepodge skyline of San Francisco looming hazily beyond it. I couldn't help but think that a skater would kill to drain this pool. It's beautiful.
SPEAKER_06: Wow.
SPEAKER_05: It's hard to overstate the importance of the Donnell Garden to both formal landscape architecture and everyday American backyards. Sandy Donnell told me that a picture of the garden was in the Encyclopedia Britannica under landscape architecture. The property also helped create what we think of as the modern suburban backyard, with the lawn, the deck, and the pool.
SPEAKER_02: I would guess, with the exception possibly of Versailles, that the Donnell Garden is probably the most published garden, at least in the 20th century.
SPEAKER_05: Architectural historian Mark Tribe. The Donnell Garden was designed by Thomas Church, a landscape architect who wanted to create outdoor spaces that people would use and love. The title of Thomas Church's book was actually Gardens Are For People.
SPEAKER_02: In Gardens Are For People, he asked hypothetical clients, how much do you really like to garden? If you don't want to garden, you know, the paving makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_05: Church said that gardens didn't necessarily have to be those traditional rows and rows of flowers. And this was a revelation for modern families like the Donnells. They wanted a place for parties and relaxing and lounging. They wanted their yard to be a piece of functional art that their kids and dogs could clamber on. The Donnell Garden became the epitome of outdoor California lifestyle. Throughout the 1950s, lifestyle magazines like Sunset and House Beautiful featured the Donnell Garden on their covers.
SPEAKER_02: In many ways, it became the icon, certainly of American modern landscape architecture. A lot of it being, of course, that's why we're here for the swimming pool.
SPEAKER_05: As images of the Donnell Garden began to spread, newly minted suburbanites across Southern California began to imitate it. And West Coast landscape architects were inspired by its creative use of paving and lawn and its beautiful, biomorphic, curvy pool.
SPEAKER_11: The pool inspired thousands of imitators and eventually thousands of young skaters in Southern California. Now, we can't know for sure exactly where Thomas Church came up with the idea of using the original kidney shape. Metro boomerang shapes were appearing in everything from fine art to mass-produced textiles and Formica tables. By 1947, these shapes were everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: You know, they were on everything and everywhere. So it's really hard to say.
SPEAKER_11: But there is a really interesting and widespread theory about where Church got his inspiration for the kidney pool.
SPEAKER_07: Skateboarding came to my neighborhood like at the end of 1980s. We got a little bit of like magazines and videos coming from the California scene. Part three, Finland.
SPEAKER_11: Avery Dromfmann actually went to Finland.
SPEAKER_05: How did you get those videos of the skaters in California?
SPEAKER_07: The first ones came like when someone's dad went to, you know, a business trip to the States and then they brought back some videos.
SPEAKER_05: Janasario grew up in Finland watching videos of California skaters and he caught the bug in a big way. He started skateboarding and then became sponsored and started skating in cities all over the world.
SPEAKER_07: Through skateboarding, I fell in love with architecture and design.
SPEAKER_05: Jano went to university and studied architecture in part to have more control over the spaces he skated.
SPEAKER_07: I'll just like sneak into that business and I won't tell anyone that I'm a skater and just make sure that the handrail is skateable or the stairs have good materials and curves.
SPEAKER_05: And in architecture school, Jano distinctly remembers a lecture he heard about the origins of the kidney pool.
SPEAKER_07: There was a professor coming from California and she was having a lecture and talking about the Dornel Garden. I think she was saying that it's the mother of all kidney pools.
SPEAKER_05: But that didn't seem right to Jano. He knew about another kidney pool.
SPEAKER_07: He's actually a grandmother of all pools. He's in Finland, in the middle of Finland.
SPEAKER_05: And it was designed by an architect and designer named Alvar Aalto.
SPEAKER_09: Alvar Aalto's work and his life was exceptional in that sense that he was a pioneer in cross-disciplinary thinking and design.
SPEAKER_05: This is Antti Alava, an architect and vice president of Aalto University, which is named after Alvar Aalto.
SPEAKER_09: He designed marvelous furniture. And also he had a flourishing business.
SPEAKER_05: Alvar Aalto is the man in Finland. There are busts of him everywhere. He designed a lot of the public and government buildings and meeting halls in Helsinki. And Alvar Aalto's furniture is in, I kid you not, almost every single building.
SPEAKER_09: Almost every home has something designed by Alvar Aalto.
SPEAKER_05: Aalto is beloved and venerated beyond Finland, too. Frank Lloyd Wright loved Aalto and he hated other architects. Frank Gehry also cites Aalto as one of the only other architects that he admires. Alvar Aalto was an architect's architect. And his work helped create a unique Finnish aesthetic, which was an important part of developing a unique Finnish identity. Because Finland is a relatively young country.
SPEAKER_09: Finland was first for about 500 years part of Sweden and then for 100 years part of Russia.
SPEAKER_05: There are some movie theaters in California that are older than Finland. It was only in 1917 that Finland became independent. Before that it was Russian. And it looks like it. The architecture in downtown Helsinki is unexpectedly regal and intimidating. The buildings line the streets like towering pastel cakes with white ornate trim. Helsinki has stood in for Moscow and Leningrad in a number of films.
SPEAKER_09: And at the end of the 19th century it became very important to create our own national identity and try to get independent.
SPEAKER_05: Finland wanted to step away from Soviet romanticism. Especially because the rest of Europe was experimenting with a new approach called functionalism. Functionalism was a reaction to the dirty, nasty, polluted cities of the 19th century which were loaded down with extra trim and ornaments and statues. And functionalism was like an architectural cleanse.
SPEAKER_09: Functionalism wanted to be healthy. There was lots of sunlight there between buildings. It was fresh.
SPEAKER_05: Think of the sharp lines and steel and metal of the German Bauhaus or the pristine concrete of Le Corbusier. Functionalism is clean, geometric, stark, spacious, modern, and a little sterile. So Aalto was influenced by functionalist ideas, but wanted to humanize them.
SPEAKER_09: Adopting these kind of international influences and making his own versions of that.
SPEAKER_05: Aalto's architecture was crisp and functional, but a little more natural and organic. And he did this in part by using a lot of wood. He made wood behave in ways it hadn't before.
SPEAKER_12: Bending and gluing in a new way.
SPEAKER_05: This is Jonas Malmberg, architect and art historian with the Aalto Foundation. Where are we? Can you describe where we are?
SPEAKER_12: Sure, this is Aalto's own house. And also the office was located here.
SPEAKER_05: Jonas showed me the legs of some chairs and stools Aalto had made and talked about Aalto's patented method for bending and curving wood. This method allowed Aalto to make curvy molds to make these wavy glass vases that he became famous for.
SPEAKER_12: It's blown in the timber mold. They get a bit different and new shapes for it.
SPEAKER_05: Curves made their way into Aalto's stairways and walls. And he made curving partitions to break up space. And he used rounded tiles and undulating countertops. So is it fair to say a lot of the curves he just made because he could? Like he figured out how to do it and he was just giddy with it?
SPEAKER_12: Probably, yes. And he probably wanted those. He wanted the buildings to be kind of something that you can't really predict.
SPEAKER_05: So when an art collector and lumber heiress named Rie Gulliksson asked Aalto to design her country home, the Villa Maeria, Aalto wanted to keep it very stark and clean. But also very friendly and natural. And we don't have there like any expensive material.
SPEAKER_12: Just timber on the floor, some red brick on the wall. We don't have any material that would be posh.
SPEAKER_05: But of course in Finland, if you're going to have a country villa, you're going to have a sauna.
SPEAKER_12: It's part of our Finnish way of spending the time in the rural countryside. It's a sauna culture.
SPEAKER_05: And if you're going to have a sauna, you need a pool to cool off in. And Alvar Aalto made a pool with a very curious shape. Well, it's the kind of free form.
SPEAKER_12: It's a bit of a, well, maybe a sock. Is it? It is, it is, it is.
SPEAKER_05: It's kind of a sock. With curvy ends. The story goes that Thomas Church, the California landscape architect who designed the Dinnell Garden, went on a trip to Finland with his wife Betsy in 1937. Somehow they found out the address of Alvar Aalto's home and studio and got themselves there. And they just knocked on the door. Architectural historian Mark Tribagan.
SPEAKER_02: When the story goes, Aalto came out in his bathrobe and invited them in.
SPEAKER_05: And so Thomas Church and his wife Betsy and Alvar Aalto and his first wife, I know, all really hit it off. And they got to be good friends. And it is quite possibly the case that Aalto's design for the Villa Myria and its sock-shaped pool were displayed in his studio when Thomas Church was visiting.
SPEAKER_02: Myria was finished in 39, but they were there in 37. Maybe it was on the drawing boards and maybe there was no pool at the time. I mean, we just don't know.
SPEAKER_05: There's no way to verify it, but that's the story architects tell. If there's a book about the Dinnell Garden, it's probably going to have a mention of the Villa Myria. Yeah, the story goes that Thomas Church went back home.
SPEAKER_07: Then it was 1948 when the Dinnell Garden was made. So almost 10 years after.
SPEAKER_05: And then the Dinnell Garden pool becomes famous, appearing on magazine covers and inspiring hundreds of imitators across Southern California. And these hundreds of curvy biomorphic pools get emptied out in the drought in the 1970s and inspire a whole new skate culture. And that culture inspired kids around the world like Jana to take up skateboarding. And skateboarding inspired Jana to become an architect. And now he has a specialty.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I'm the only skate park designer in Finland.
SPEAKER_05: He designs curvaceous pools all over Europe. Pools exclusively for skating.
SPEAKER_07: There's one big pool coming to the east side of Helsinki. It's a really nice figure and something to be proud of, I think.
SPEAKER_05: When Jana says he's proud, he means that public skate parks and skate pools should be a source of civic pride, especially in Finland, where, Jana likes to tease, modern skateboarding began.
SPEAKER_07: I kind of use it as a joke when we're out with skate park builders. They're usually from states or Canada and I try to claim skateboarding for having its roots in Finland.
SPEAKER_05: Some say that Álvar Aalto's pool at the Villa Mairia was inspired by the soft bends in a Finnish lake. Or maybe Aalto was just excited about his ability to make wavy forms, since that kind of became his signature in his furniture and homewares. Or who knows, maybe he was inspired by some other curvy pool somewhere else in the world that we don't know about. Aalto didn't like to talk about his inspiration. He didn't write too much about it either. Aalto only talked about the birth of his ideas in an extended metaphor, about a fish in a
SPEAKER_11: stream. Architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology. Perhaps they are, for instance, like some big salmon or trout. They're not born fully grown. They're not even born in the sea or water where they normally live. They're born hundreds of miles away from their home grounds, where the river is narrow to tiny streams. Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to mature into a fully grown fish, so we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in our world of ideas.
SPEAKER_04: Go farther up, push.
SPEAKER_03: Jeez. You could have made that.
SPEAKER_11: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Trauffman, edited by Delaney Hall, mixed by Sharif Yousif, and music by Sean Real and Melodium. Our senior producer is Katie Mingle. And Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the staff includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Taron Masa, and me, Roman Mars. Sincere gratitude this week to Michael Burnett, Marc Rodriguez, Jason Reitman, Chris Funk and Adam Lee, Charles Birnbaum and the Cultural Landscape Foundation, San Francisco Garden designer Gabriel Cameron, David Lewis, and Aalto University. And special shout out to Andrew Norton for sparking this idea. The archival sound was from the Vanderbilt University archive and the 1978 movie Skateboard Kings, which you can find on YouTube. If you haven't seen Stacey's documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys yet, I'm actually kind of jealous of you. It's really good. You're going to enjoy it. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Most people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern, coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_11: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Did you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. Downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P I org or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you're not really getting the full 99% invisible experience if you don't go to our website. It's 99 P I dot org.
SPEAKER_11: Radio 10 P I from PRX.
SPEAKER_06: Sometimes we lose, sometimes we win. Sometimes we try to fit it all in. Sometimes we don't know what's in store. Sometimes we find what we're looking for. Sometimes we're rolling easy and free. Sometimes one and one makes three. So much to love along this ride. That's why Nationwide is on your side.
SPEAKER_11: Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates, Columbus, Ohio.
SPEAKER_08: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no name hotel that says no to every request? No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself.
SPEAKER_08: Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast. I think I broke a tooth. When you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you, it matters where you stay.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast.
SPEAKER_08: Hilton for the stay.
SPEAKER_01: Gatorade Zero has all the electrolytes and all the flavor of Gatorade with zero sugar. To help you get more out of your workout routine. How much more? It helps you feel more hydrated through every mile, every set, and every song in your fitness routine. No matter how you choose to move, Gatorade Zero got your back. From yoga to kickboxing and everything in between, Gatorade Zero is the perfect partner for whatever workout comes your way. Helping you get more, do more, and be more with zero. Get more out of zero.
