370- The Pool and the Stream Redux

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I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. So we're doing something a little different this week. Avery, I'm in the studio with Avery Trofman. Say hi. Hi. One of the things about this story in particular is that it's about the process of ideas and how they move through the world. Correct? Yeah, exactly. It follows the seed of an idea from one unexpected place to a kind of other unexpected place. SPEAKER_05: And without giving away the whole story, it's an episode that I did in 2017 that has become very near and dear to me because of what it's about, because it's about where ideas come from. And that's something I think about a lot. But it's also because the story isn't over. It just continues to unfold like the sequence of inspiration is continuing to unfurl. And now in the telling of the story, we have become a part of it, which is a cryptic way of saying that there are updates. So we want to play the story that you did. Is it called The Pool in the Stream? SPEAKER_09: So long ago. Yeah. Yes. I think it's called The Pool in the Stream. SPEAKER_05: We're going to play The Pool in the Stream, and then we're going to tell you a whole nother story about how this story went out in the world and changed the world a little bit more. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Check it out. SPEAKER_09: 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 fishpond 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. Part one, California. This looks pretty funny. SPEAKER_07: Two skaters in a plaza are confronted by a guard. SPEAKER_07: Can't skate here? Nope. Oh man, it looks so good. SPEAKER_12: 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_12: 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_12: I'm a skater. I dress like a skater. These are the costumes I've been running all of my life. I don't wear f***ing Louis Vuitton clothes and s***. I mean, I wear sneakers. This is just 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. 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. SPEAKER_12: 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. So what is, where does the artistry come in? SPEAKER_12: It's your whole joie de vivre, how you hold yourself. And that joie de vivre, that sort of badass devil-may-care attitude that skaters have perfected. SPEAKER_05: That's kind of funny because skateboarding was pretty dorky back when it was just getting started. The very first skateboard was called the skateboard scooter, and it was a scooter. SPEAKER_06: 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. SPEAKER_05: Stacey says at some point, no one really knows when, but someone knocked the handlebars off the scooter and just rode the board. SPEAKER_06: 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. It was like the hula hoop. It has come and gone. SPEAKER_06: As the skateboard fad was receding into the distance, Stacey was growing up in Venice Beach, California. SPEAKER_05: It was the early 70s, 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. What we really wanted to do was emulate surfing. SPEAKER_05: They wanted to surf on land. And they discovered old skateboards. SPEAKER_06: One of my friends, his older brothers had skateboarded in the very early 60s, and they had two skateboards left in their garage that they never touched. So we started riding those boards. Those early skateboards had these hard, clunky wheels made out of clay or steel. SPEAKER_05: 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. It's flat land tricks. That's basically what you could do. SPEAKER_06: Stacey was really young, like maybe seven years old. SPEAKER_05: But he can remember skating for the first time. Even with those big, clunky clay wheels, little Stacey found a blissful stillness. SPEAKER_06: 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. But after I wore that out, there was no more boards that I could buy in stores. SPEAKER_06: You couldn't buy a skateboard back then. 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. SPEAKER_05: 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. 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. SPEAKER_06: You know, every single day, seven days a week. And you'd probably go, geez, maybe we should tell this kid that there's no future in this. Then in the early 70s, an invention comes along that would revolutionize skateboarding. SPEAKER_05: 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_11: The wheels were sold at surf shops, since there were no skate shops, and they were advertised in Surfer magazine. SPEAKER_05: 58-46 altogether. SPEAKER_05: And in the summer of 1974, sales of urethane wheels went gangbusters. Suddenly we had a wheel that could grip, and it could roll over bumps and little rocks. SPEAKER_06: 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. And so that meant school yards, that meant in garages, city buildings. It was any place. Anything was rideable. SPEAKER_06: 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_06: The drought was so bad in the 70s that the water company ran billboard ads that encouraged couples to shower together to save water. And to further save water, people didn't fill up their swimming pools. SPEAKER_05: And in Los Angeles, there are a lot of swimming pools, and they're very distinctive looking. SPEAKER_06: 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. The pools of Los Angeles are shaped like peanuts, like keyholes, like kidney beans. SPEAKER_05: They have these curved, undulating edges. They are 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_06: They just were so beautifully conceived and designed, and we fell in love with the shapes. Stacey and his friends would hunt for pools. SPEAKER_05: 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. We'll bail. We'll lift it up to you guys. If there was 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_06: When we finally got to ride swimming pools and feel weightless, like going up a vertical wall, weightlessness is pretty extraordinary. 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_05: 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_06: And this beauty attracted attention. SPEAKER_05: 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. At that point, every kid in America and all over the world wanted to get inside a swimming pool. SPEAKER_06: 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. So style became less important, and extreme maneuvers became more important. SPEAKER_06: Aerial tricks paved the way for the X Games, Half Pipes, and Tony Hawk. SPEAKER_05: 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_06: 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. More people are skateboarding now than ever. SPEAKER_12: It's a seven billion dollar industry, god damn. That's Jake Phelps at Thrasher again. SPEAKER_05: People are skating pools every day. People are skating right now. SPEAKER_12: Somebody just broke their arm in a pool right now. Trust me. And the pools of California bring us to our next chapter. SPEAKER_09: Do you know the story about where the bean shaped pool comes from? SPEAKER_05: The bean shape? What's the bean shape? The right hand of kidney? SPEAKER_12: Is that what it's called? SPEAKER_05: Well yeah, you know what's called a bean shape? SPEAKER_12: I don't know. Well it's a, I mean obviously it would be some esoteric design to someone's backyard. SPEAKER_09: Well, Jake Phelps doesn't have to be all like that about it, but he's right. 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 2. 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. Hi. So you got a little lost. SPEAKER_11: Sorry, we overshot it a little bit. A little? Sounds like a lot. Justin Faggioli and Sandy Donnell are the owners and caretakers of this property, which is known as the Donnell Garden. SPEAKER_05: 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_03: 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_11: 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! Here's the object of your search. A kidney pool. SPEAKER_11: 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. 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. 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 Encyclopædia 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. I would guess, with the exception possibly of Versailles, SPEAKER_02: 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. In Gardens Are for People, he asked hypothetical clients, SPEAKER_02: how much do you really like to garden? If you don't want to garden, you know, the paving makes a lot of sense. Church said that gardens didn't necessarily have to be those traditional rows and rows of flowers. SPEAKER_05: 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. In many ways, it became the icon, certainly of American modern landscape architecture. SPEAKER_02: 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_09: 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. Retro boomerang shapes were appearing in everything from fine art to mass produced textiles and formica tables. SPEAKER_02: By 1947, these shapes were everywhere. You know, they were on everything and everywhere. So it's really hard to say. SPEAKER_09: But there is a really interesting and widespread theory about where Church got his inspiration for the kidney pool. SPEAKER_08: Skateboarding came to my neighborhood at the end of 1980s. We got a little bit of magazines and videos coming from the Californian scene. Part three, Finland. Avery Droufferman actually went to Finland. SPEAKER_05: How did you get those videos of the skaters in California? SPEAKER_08: The first ones came when someone's dad went to a business trip to the States and then they brought back some videos. Jan Assario grew up in Finland watching videos of California skaters and he caught the bug in a big way. SPEAKER_05: He started skateboarding and then became sponsored and started skating in cities all over the world. SPEAKER_08: Through skateboarding I fell in love with architecture and design. Jan went to university and studied architecture in part to have more control over the spaces he skated. SPEAKER_05: I'll just like sneak into that business and I won't tell anyone that I'm a skater. SPEAKER_08: Just make sure that the handrail is skateable or the stairs have good materials and curves. And in architecture school, Jan distinctly remembers a lecture he heard about the origins of the kidney pool. SPEAKER_08: There was a professor coming from California and she was having a lecture and talking about the Dornell Garden. I think she was saying that it's the mother of all kidney pools. SPEAKER_05: But that didn't seem right to Jan. He knew about another kidney pool. SPEAKER_08: It's actually a grandmother of all pools. It's in Finland, in the middle of Finland. SPEAKER_05: And it was designed by an architect and designer named Alvar Aalto. Alvar Aalto's work and his life was exceptional in that sense that he was a pioneer in cross-disciplinary thinking and design. SPEAKER_04: This is Antti Alava, an architect and vice president of Aalto University, which is named after Alvar Aalto. SPEAKER_05: He designed marvelous furniture and also he had a flourishing business. SPEAKER_04: Alvar Aalto is the man in Finland. There are busts of him everywhere. SPEAKER_05: 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. Almost every home has something designed by Alvar Aalto. SPEAKER_05: Alto 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_04: 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_04: And at the end of the 19th century it became very important to create our own national identity and try to get independent. Finland wanted to step away from Soviet romanticism. SPEAKER_05: 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_04: Functionalism wanted to be healthy. There was lots of sunlight. Air between buildings, it was fresh. Think of the sharp lines and steel and metal of the German Bauhaus. SPEAKER_05: 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. Adopting these kind of international influences and making his own versions of that. SPEAKER_04: Aalto's architecture was crisp and functional, but a little more natural and organic. SPEAKER_05: And he did this in part by using a lot of wood. He made wood behave in ways it hadn't before. SPEAKER_10: Bending and gluing in a new way. This is Jonas Malmberg, architect and art historian with the Aalto Foundation. SPEAKER_05: Where are we? Can you describe where we are? SPEAKER_10: Sure, this is Aalto's own house. And also the office was located here. Jonas showed me the legs of some chairs and stools Aalto had made. SPEAKER_05: 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. It's blown in the timber mold. We get a bit different and new shapes for it. SPEAKER_10: Curves made their way into Aalto's stairways and walls. SPEAKER_05: 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? Probably, yes. And he probably wanted those. SPEAKER_10: He wanted the buildings to be kind of something that you can't really predict. So when an art collector and lumber heiress named Rie Gülixson SPEAKER_05: 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_10: Just timber on the floor, some red brick on the wall. We don't have any material that would be posh. But of course in Finland, if you're going to have a country villa, SPEAKER_05: you're going to have a sauna. It's part of our Finnish way of spending the time in the rural countryside. SPEAKER_10: It's sauna culture. And if you're going to have a sauna, you need a pool to cool off in. SPEAKER_05: And Alvar Aalto made a pool with a very curious shape. Well it's the kind of free form. It's a bit of a, well, maybe a sock. Isn't it? SPEAKER_10: It is, it is, it is. It's kind of a sock. SPEAKER_05: With curvy ends. The story goes that Thomas Church, the California landscape architect who designed the Dinnel 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 Tribe again. When the story goes, Aalto came out in his bathrobe and invited them in. SPEAKER_02: And so Thomas Church and his wife Betsy and Alvar Aalto SPEAKER_05: and his first wife, Aino, all really hit it off. And they got to be good friends. SPEAKER_02: And it is quite possibly the case that Aalto's design for the Villa Myria SPEAKER_05: and its sock-shaped pool were displayed in his studio when Thomas Church was visiting. Myria was finished in 39, but they were there in 37. SPEAKER_02: 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 Dinnel Garden, it's probably going to have a mention of the Villa Myria. Yeah, the story goes that Thomas Church went back home. SPEAKER_08: Then it was 1948 when the Dinnel Garden was made. So almost ten years after. SPEAKER_05: And then the Dinnel 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_08: Yeah, I'm the only skate park designer in Finland. SPEAKER_05: He designs curvaceous pools all over Europe. Pools exclusively for skating. SPEAKER_08: 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. When Jana says he's proud, SPEAKER_05: 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. I kind of use it as a joke when we're out with skate park builders. SPEAKER_08: They're usually from states or Canada and 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 stream. SPEAKER_09: 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 are 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_12: Go farther up. Push. SPEAKER_11: Jeez. SPEAKER_09: Jake Phelps, the editor of Thrasher magazine, passed away in March of 2019. USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence, and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs, like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises and the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. 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My youngest son, who was then 12, had this idea for my oldest son who skateboards, who is then 14. SPEAKER_03: He should start on a senior project now of a new skate park, which I thought was like, what a crazy idea, you know, they're not even in high school yet. It's actually a great idea for a senior project, though. SPEAKER_05: There was already a skate park in their town, which was built as a senior project back in 1999. And so Jonathan poked around a bit and looked into what was going on with this skate park. And found out that a committee was just about to form through the Parks Department SPEAKER_03: for a renovation of a skate park in Columbus. Columbus, Indiana. That's where Jonathan lives. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. You know about Columbus, Indiana. SPEAKER_09: Famed Columbus, Indiana. Because you have a show about architecture and design. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's this unexpected epicenter of modern design. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. It's amazing. SPEAKER_05: Exactly. It's the small city of 27,000 people. But it's full of soaring, statuesque, modernist buildings by some of the most canonical architects of the 20th century. You would think with 85 significant works of architecture, it would be a highbrow place, but it's just so everyday and civic. SPEAKER_05: It's not like the homes in Columbus, Indiana are fancy. The cool thing is it's all the public buildings. It really is. Every fire station and police station and elementary, middle, high school, junior colleges, they're all done by significant architects. SPEAKER_03: Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi, Paul Kennan, Gunnar Brucket, Cesar Pelly. And you might think that this would be a town full of architecture nerds and useless hipsters like me. SPEAKER_05: But it's very blue collar. SPEAKER_03: It's working class, but there's a high concentration of engineers because of the automotive fields. SPEAKER_05: And also because of the automotive industry, Columbus is a very diverse town because there are engineers and employees from all over the world. And then the engine, WANK, of Columbus is a corporation called Cummins. It's a Fortune 500 company that designs, manufactures and distributes engines. SPEAKER_03: And they work with Nissan and John Deere and Dodge. And Cummins started about 100 years ago with this old banking family in Columbus. SPEAKER_03: The family's chauffeur was tinkering and perfecting the diesel engines. His name was Clessie Cummins. Cummins was a farm boy who stopped schooling at eighth grade, but clearly he was a talented mechanic. SPEAKER_05: The wealthy family he worked for and their patriarch, the industrialist Joseph Irwin Miller, bankrolled an engine company and Clessie Cummins, their chauffeur, became the CEO. And in the late 30s, as a civic gift to the town, both to beautify it and also to attract talent, the industrialist Miller decided to give his little city a beautiful new church. But the fateful thing was who they got to design the church. Eliel Saarinen's name came up and that changed the course of the city. SPEAKER_03: So Eliel Saarinen, you know, is a massive deal. SPEAKER_05: When I was in Finland, the two big names that came up over and over again were Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto. Like Aalto's reign was post-war. Saarinen was early turn of the last century. And while Aalto did that kind of natural modernism style, Eliel Saarinen did these regal nouveau style buildings with stone and copper patina. Like he designed the Grand Central Helsinki train station. And then Eliel Saarinen moved to the United States in the 20s and settled in the Midwest. He was a professor at the University of Michigan. And here in the States, Eliel is just as famous for his buildings as he is for his son. Because he was the father of... Arrow Saarinen. Exactly. Like when most Americans say Saarinen, they're talking about Arrow. He did the St. Louis Arch, the old TWA terminal at New York's JFK airport. He designed the famous tulip chair made of white plastic and red cushioning. He's huge. He's like a master of the 20th century. And so when Eliel Saarinen built a simple geometric limestone church in 1942 in Columbus, Indiana, Arrow Saarinen got roped in. SPEAKER_03: He worked with his father on the first church and then he did one of his last buildings was North Christian Church in 64. SPEAKER_05: Arrow also built the conference center in town and a private house for the wealthy Miller family. Like his fingerprints are all over Columbus, Indiana. And then after Arrow passed away, all the architects in his office went and did work in Columbus. And it spread from there. Like in Columbus, Indiana, I.M. Pei did the library. Edward Charles Bassett of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill did the city hall. Columbus basically became an institution. This is quite incredible to see this single move of hiring Eliel Saarinen and the chain of events that happened because of it. SPEAKER_05: Which is also so funny that just like the pool in the stream, like that story starts in Finland. SPEAKER_02: Yes. Which brings us back to the skate park in town. SPEAKER_05: So as you can imagine, it's kind of intimidating to build something in a town full of wildly impressive architecture. But Jonathan wanted to be part of the process. I got on the committee with a lot of sessions about what this is going to be just like we recreate this exactly the way it was. SPEAKER_03: And then your podcast came. I just looked it up July 4th of 17. And then I reached out to Yana July 27th. So Jonathan reached out to Yana Sarrio, the Finnish skate park designer in the story because of our episode. SPEAKER_05: Wow. Yana became the designer of the skate park in Columbus. It's been incredible to work with a true master at his craft. SPEAKER_03: And pairing him with a local skate park builder where everyone on the team skateboards, the owners of the company skateboard. And they're troweling concrete. It's like there's just so much heart and passion. And we'll post pictures of the skate park so listeners can see it, but it's totally beautiful. SPEAKER_05: The park, the park almost looks like ocean waves. People love it. SPEAKER_03: It's just been absolutely incredible. The skaters, the BMXers, the guys that ride the scooters, they all love it. It was there yesterday. Nearly 50 people there. SPEAKER_05: And it's so gratifying to Jonathan, especially because his oldest son was also on the committee. So it was kind of a family effort. And now they all get to enjoy the fruits of their labor together. Actually, the skate park has convinced Jonathan to pick up his BMX bike again. And it's just a great place to spend time with my kids. They're 14 and 16. SPEAKER_03: I don't have a whole lot of years left of them being in the house. What a kind of fun way to have them see an idea and then see the steps that it takes to realize an idea. Which of course is what the story is all about. Where ideas come from and where they travel. SPEAKER_05: I mean, who knows who will go to this park in the years to come and discover new friends or a new community or a new passion and move the chain of inspiration forward from there. Of everything that I've been part of that's by far the most meaningful. Just playing a connector, you know. SPEAKER_03: I do know. It's an amazing thing. I feel so lucky to be a part of this story. SPEAKER_05: Making these connections is the best part of my job. SPEAKER_02: That's so cool. I love it. SPEAKER_05: Me too. And the other thing is, the story could have gone back even farther. We could have talked about the origins of surfing and it could have gone forward into the future because film changed when all these skate kids started picking up cameras and they changed the way the tracking shot works in cinema. Like the story goes off in all these different directions. But the fact that it also manifested in this literal, concrete example in Columbus, Indiana is just gorgeous. SPEAKER_09: I love it. That's great. Good update. The world is better. Thank you Avery. SPEAKER_05: Thanks Roman. SPEAKER_09: Sincere gratitude this week to Michael Burnett, Mark Rodriguez, Jason Reitman, Chris Funk and Adam Lee, Charles Birnbaum and the Cultural Landscape Foundation, San Francisco Garden Designer Gabrielle Cameron, David Lewis and Aalto University. And a special shout out to Andrew Norton for sparking this idea and Kelsey Keith for telling us about the Columbus, Indiana connection. The archival sound was from the Vanderbilt University Archive and the 1978 movie Skateboard Kings, which you can find on YouTube. Please do yourself a favor and watch Stacey's documentary Dogtown in Z-Boys. It is great. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. 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 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But we have all the threads of this story gathered together for you to follow to your heart's content at 99pi.org. SPEAKER_07: 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. 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