99% Invisible - 265- The Pool and the Stream

Episode Date: July 5, 2017

This is the story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern California and landscape architecture in Northern California, and then the world. A documentary in three … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When people ask us where we get our stories from, the answer is usually hard to pen 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, Oliver Alto, 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'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 rivers narrow to tiny streams.

Just as it takes time for us to spec a fish pond 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. Two skaters in a plaza are confronted by a guard.

Can't skate here? Oh, man, it looks so good. Just one broken leg, please. Can't skate here? Oh, man, it looks so good. Just one broken leg, please. 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.

Masked to start by introducing yourself? My name is Jake Phelps, I'm the editor of Thrasher Magazine from San Francisco, California, born and raised. Yeah, what do you got? 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, and sneakers and beanie caps, slumped behind monitors like caged animals. You can tell they'd rather be skating. I'm a skater, I dress like a skater. These are the costumes I've been running all my life. I don't wear a fucking Louis Vuitton clothes,

and I'm doing that worst sneakers. And this is the way it is. We're utilitarian, we skate. It's the greatest thing in the world. Jake Phelps is 55 years old. Tattoos, all over his arms. Big thick glasses of his face and close cropped gray hair.

He blatantly hits on me in the interview and invites me to his punk band 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.

Fuck you. Say the fuck away from me. skateboarding is, you know, it's like an extension of me. It's like it's an art. It's like, it's an art. It's something that you have to understand. So where does the artistry come in? It's your whole Jouat-e-V. How you hold yourself.

And that Jouat-e-Vue, that sort of badass, double-may-care attitude that skaters have perfected. 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. 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. And probably emulated surfing. And so what happened was, skateboarding had a very, very brief appearance in 1964 and 65. 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. As the skateboard fad was receding into the distance, Stacey was growing up in Venice Beach, California. 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.

They wanted to surf on land. And they discovered old skateboards. 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.

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. Stacey was really young, like maybe seven years old.

But you can remember skating for the first time. Even with those big clunky clay wheels, Little Stacey found a blissful stillness. 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. But Stacey and his friends were discovering skateboards Well, the rest of the country was forgetting them Stacey had that old board heat on earth than his friends garage, but after I wore that out

There was no more boards to see, you know, that I could buy in stores It just you couldn't buy a skateboard back then. So instead there's no more boards to see, you know, that I could buy in stores. It just, 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. 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, 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, the year-arethane 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 Yerathanes

began producing urethane wheels specifically for skateboarding. Put the board together back there and then up put the wheels on a feral thing. The wheels were sold at surf shops since there were no skate shops and they were advertised in surfer magazine. 58.46 altogether. 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 in little rocks and it allowed us to attack terrain that previously were not we were not able to

attack. 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, but none of this was designed for us, none of them. 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, and the pavement, and the concrete of their world. And then, in the mid-70s, there was a drought in California. 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 crave for rain. But right now, the workers say not as expected. 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. And in Los Angeles, there are a lot of swimming pools and they're very distinctive looking. 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. They have these curved, unrelating 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. They just were so beautifully conceived and designed and um, we fell in love with the shapes.

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 hopped a fence, they'd break in. We'll bail and we'll look it up to you guys. If there's a little bit of old dirty water in the pool, they'd break in. Well, failed, we'll look 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 away. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. Ariel 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. 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. The pools of Southern California and their proliferation led to the proliferation of skating. More people are skateboarding now than ever. It's a $7 billion industry. Goddamn. That's Jake Phelps at Thrashere again. People are skating pools every day. People are skating right now.

Somebody just broke their arm in a pool right now. Trust me. And the pools of California bring us to our next chapter. Do you know the story about where the bean shape pool comes from? The bean shape, what's the bean shape? And the right, Henny Kinney? Is that what it's called? Well, yeah, they're called bean shape. I don't know.

Well, 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. It starts with one So-Taric 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 lone

curvy dirt road, the car pulls into a driveway. Three small dogs rush out to meet a retruffinist. Justin Faggiole and Sandy Dunnell are the owners and caretakers of this property, which is known as the Dunnell 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-modernmodern looking house on a hill. It was Sandy's parents' place. My group on the Danelle Ranch property, born in 1951, the youngest of three children. The Danelle 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. of the century had been more or less symmetrical rows of different kinds of flowers. They were kind of like plant museums. May be accented with a geometric hedge or a fruit tree. The Donald Garden is nothing like that. It's mostly lawn. The lawn is a unifying feature. It meanders through everything and it becomes the river, the green river that goes from space

to space. 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 matease 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. This, from what we know, was the first kidney shaped pool in California. 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. because I tried it. The pool overlooks acres of dusty ranching property. You can hear the hum of cars on a racetrack, often the distance, and you can see the Hodgepodge skyline of San Francisco, looming hazeily beyond it. I couldn't help but think that a stator would kill to drain this pool. It's beautiful.

Wow. Wow. It's hard to overstate the importance of the Don Al Garden to both formal landscape architecture and everyday American backyards. Sandy Don Al told me that a picture of the garden was Indian cyclopedia 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, a Versailles, that the Denel Garden was probably the most published garden, at least in the 20th century. Architectural historian Mark Tribe. The Denel 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, 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. 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. A lot of it being, of course, is why we're here for the swimming pool. As images of the Denelgarten 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, biomorphorphic curvy pool. 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 for myka tables. By 1947ang shapes were appearing in everything from fine art to mass-produced textiles and for micotables. By 1947, these shapes were everywhere.

You know, they were on everything and everywhere. So it's really hard to say. But there is a really interesting and widespread theory about where church got his inspiration for the kidney pool. Skateboarding came to my neighborhood at the end of the 1980s. We got a little bit of magazines and videos coming from the California scene. Part 3. Finland. A redroffman actually went to Finland.

How did you get those videos of the skaters in California? The first ones came when some was dead, went to a business trip to states and then they brought back some videos. Janna Sario 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. Through skateboarding, I fell in love with architecture and design.

Yana went to university and studied architecture, in part to have more control over the spaces he skated. I'll just like sneak into that business, and I won't tell anyone that I'm a skater, and just make sure that they hand railing skateable or the stairs have a good good materials and curves. In architecture school, Yana distinctly remembers a lecture he heard about the origins of the kidney pool.

There was a professor coming from California. She was having a lecture and talking about the donor garden. I think she was saying that it's the mother of all kidney pools. But that didn't seem right to Yana. He knew about another kidney pool. It's actually a grand mother of all pools. It's in Finland, in the middle of Finland. And it was designed by an architect and designer

named Alvar Alto. Alvar Alto's work and his life was exceptional in that sense that he was a pioneer in a cross-disciplinary thinking and design. This is Auntie Alava, an architect and vice president of Alto University, which is named after Alvar Alto. He designed a marvelous furniture, and also he had a flourishing business. Alvar Alto 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 Alta's furniture is in, I kid you not. Almost every single building. Almost every home has something designed by Alvar Alta. Alta is beloved and venerated beyond Finland too. Frank Lloyd Wright loved Alta and he hated other architects.

Frank Gary also sites Alto as one of the only other architects that he admires. Alvar Alto was an architect's architect, and his work helped create a unique, finish aesthetic, which was an important part of developing a unique, finish identity. Because Finland is a relatively young country. OK, Finland was first for about 500 years part of Sweden, and then for 100 years part of Russia. 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 Lenin grad

in a number of films. And at the end of 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, 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.

Functionism wanted to be healthy. There was a lot of sunlight here between buildings. It was fresh. Think of the sharp lines and steel and metal of the German Bauhaus or the pristine concrete of Lecobusier. Functionalism is clean, geometric, stark, spacious, modern, and a little sterile.

So Alta was influenced by functionalist ideas, but wanted to humanize them. Adopting this kind of international influences and making his own versions of that. Alto'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. Bending and gluing in a new way. This is Jonas Moundberg, architect and art historian with the Alto Foundation. Where are we? Can you describe where we are?

Sure, this is Alo's own house, and also the office was located here. Jonas showed me the legs of some chairs and stools Aldo had made, and talked about Aldo's patented method for bending and curving wood. This method allowed Aldo 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 a new shapes for it. Curves made their way into alto stairways and walls

and he made curving partitions to break up space and he used rounded tiles and undulating countertops. So it was a 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 getting... Probably, yes, yes. And he probably wanted those. He wanted the buildings to be kind of something that you can't really predict.

So when an art collector and lumbererist named Marie Goulixon asked Alta to design her country home, the Villa Myria, Alta wanted to keep it very stark and clean, but also very friendly and natural. And we don't have there like any expensive material. Just timber in 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, you're going to have a sauna. It's part of our Finnish way of spending the time in the rural countryside It's a sauna culture. And if you're gonna have a sauna, you need a pool to cool off in and over alto Made a pool with a very curious shape. Well, it's the kind of reform. It's a bit of a, well, maybe a sock, you see it? It is, it is, it's kind of a sock

With curvy ends. Hmm. The story goes that Thomas Church, the California Landscape Architect who designed the Denel Garden, went on a trip to Finland with his wife Betsy in 1937. Somehow they found out the address of Alvar Altos home in studio and got themselves there. And they just knocked on the door. Architectural historian Mark Trivian. When the story goes, Altos' home in studio and got themselves there. And they just knocked on the door.

Architectural historian Mark Trivigan. When the story goes, Altos came out in his bathroom and invited them in. And so Thomas Church and his wife Betsy and Alvar Altos and his first wife, I know, all really hit her off. And they got to be good friends. And it is quite possibly the case that Altos' design for the Villa Myria and its sock-shaped pool were displayed in his studio when Thomas Church was visiting.

Myder 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. There's no way to verify it. But that's the story Architects tell. If there's a book about the Donnell Garden, it's probably going to have a mention of the Villa Myria. Yeah, the story goes that Thomas Church went back home, then it was 1948, and when the

Donnell Garden was made, so almost 10 years after. And then the Donnell 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 Yana to take up skateboarding. And skateboarding inspired Yana to become an architect. And now he has a specialty.

Yeah, I'm the only skate park designer in Finland. He designs curvaceous pools all over Europe. Pools exclusively for skating. There's one big pool coming to the east side of Helsinki. It's a really nice figure in. And something to be proud of, I think. When Janis says he's proud, he means that public skate parks and skate pools should be a source of civic pride, especially in Finland, where Janis likes to tease.

Modern skateboarding began. 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'm trying to claim skateboarding for having its roots in Finland. Some say that Alvar Alta's pool at the Villa Myria was inspired by the soft bends in a finished lake. Or maybe Alta was just excited about his ability to make wavy forms, since that kind of became his signature

and 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. Alto didn't like to talk about his inspiration. He didn't write too much about it either. Alto only talked about the birth of his ideas in an extended metaphor, about a fish in a stream.

Architecture in 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. Cheers! You're gonna need that. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Trouffman, edited by Delaney Hawn, mixed by Sriviusif and music by Sean Rial and Melodium.

Our senior producer is Katie Mingle, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the staff includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me Roman Mars. Since you're gratitude to this week to Michael Burnett, Mark Rodriguez, Jason Reitman, Chris Funkin' Adam Lee, Charles Bernbaum and the Cultural Landscape Foundation, San Francisco Garden designer Gabriel Cameron, David Lewis, and Alto University,

and special shout out to Andrew Norton for sparking this idea. The archival sound was from the Vanderbilt University Archive in the 1978 movie, Skateboard Kings, which you can find on YouTube. If you haven't seen Stacey's documentary, Dog Down 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 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you're not really getting the full 99% of visible experience if you don't go to our website. It's 99inipi.org. Radio to pee.

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