The Southbank Centre's famous Undercroft was a global destination for skateboarders, though it was threatened by closure and decay.

On the morning of Saturday, July 20, a wall of temporary construction fencing on the south bank of the River Thames was torn down, unveiling a 4,300-square-foot landscape of virgin concrete flooring. The space slopes in sections, culminating in L-shaped barriers and a white plywood wall, which, by the end of the 20th century, was covered in triumphant graffiti. This is the Undercroft, the open-ended subterranean space of the Brutalist Southbank Centre. It’s also the oldest, and among the most famous, consistently skateboarded space in the world.

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "How a DIY Floating Universiity in Berlin Could Be An Unorthodox Prototype for Design Education."

On the north side of Tempelhofer Feld, an airport-turned-park in southern Berlin, lays a large ditch. Surrounded by lots and bungalows and noticeable only to those in the know, this 19th century basin holds rainwater drained from the airport’s defunct runways before it is fed into Berlin’s canal network.

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