Sk8 City Part 2 Project 2004 Konstantinos Metaxas London South Bank University | UK PROUDLY ANNOYING PEDESTRIANS. Find it. Grind it. Leave it behind. Any terrain. For urban skaters the city is the hardware on their trip. The skater's engagement with the city is, in particular, a run across its terrains with momentary settlement and encounters with all manner of diverse objects and spaces; ledges, walls, hydrants, rails, steps, benches, planters, bins, kerbs, banks, and so on. In the words of Stacy Peralta, skaters can exist on the essentials of what is out there. Skateboarding reproduces architecture in its own measure, re-editing it as a series of surfaces, textures, and micro-objects. People who skate look at the world in a very different way, recomposing their own city from many different places. Kostas' SK8 City is an intensely urban architecture, wholly credible in the context of the giant White City redevelopment, not least because it is only intended to be there for the three year span of the construction programme on this site. Like skaters, the project squats a corner of the city, and then moves on, some bits retained, others discarded. It is an architecture that is unconcerned with being refined in a conventional sense, but at the same time is intensely tectonic and spatially sophisticated. Surely best experienced after dark, it is a model for brownfield sites that may not have been anticipated at the inception of the initiative to develop such marginal places, but is nevertheless a completely relevant response to that problem.