surfing the architecture of waves
master ’ s thesis extract | university of waterloo school of architecture by zubin singh
skateboarding surfing
surfboards mythology Huntington Beach Pier
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Through the act of surfing, as no other human activ- ity, man enters the domain of the breaking wave, is contained by and participates in its broadcast, measures and is in turn measured, meets its rhythm and establishes his own, negotiates continuity and rupture at the scale of the body. What is the nature of this inhabitation? A bold proposition: surfing is an architectural act. Through it the surfbreak is drawn within the sphere of culture and the wave becomes an architectural domain. Geographically the surfbreak represents an actual threshold between environs, but historically it has also been a symbolic Porta between two overlapping and irreconcilable realms, two inimical elements: the land and the sea, earth and water. On the one hand, the stable and the familiar: the ground upon which humankind has built its civilizations and institutions, established its relation to space and time, defined cul- ture. On the other, the capricious and unknowable: the quintessential other, Nature at her most fecund and ruinous, that which is beyond, indeterminate. It is no accident that Hesiod’s Aphrodite was conceived in the spume, or that Botticelli’s Venus is borne ashore on the crest of a breaking wave: the surfbreak has always been a fertile territory in the human imagi- nation, a metaphor of paradox, of life.
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