I arrived in Gropiusstadt with a small bag of clothes and my skateboard. My goal was to search this little utopia for skate spots; ones perhaps Gropius might have designed by accident, or leftover spaces that he might have glanced past that blossomed into something entirely useful to an individual like myself.  To my surprise, it didn’t take very long at all. In fact, the spot found me.  Had I barely walked out of the Lipshitz Allee U-bahn stop, I heard that familiar sound that every skater craves to hear - the hum of wheels rolling, interrupted by the sound of the tail snapping off of the concrete. My naive plan of being the first skater to interact with the modernist purity of Gropiusstadt was no more. So I ran out of the station and just followed the music.

The spot was a turned off fountain, made of a circular, concaved slab of marble with a tiny faucet in the center; basically a very small, somewhat flat, symmetrical bowl. There was definitely not enough room or vert to skate it on the inside, but it functioned like a perfect launch out over a small gap that ended right at the beginning of one of the many footpaths that join the bloc housing projects together. The trick however, was ollieing up into the fountain, avoiding the faucet in the middle, before setting up your feet and launching out. The guys already there seemed to be having no problem so I scratched out warm-up tricks and went right for it. Ten minutes later I was on the floor with a tweaked ankle and crushed hopes of skating the rest of my time in Gropiusstadt. Instead of torturing myself with exploring spots that I wouldn’t be able to skate the rest of my time there, I decided to simply absorb the overall atmosphere of the neighborhood. The resulting photographs are the product of my time doing so, without any direct relationship to my initial plans. I admit I loved my time there, despite the limping, the 8 o’clock food curfew, and overall age sixty plus residential demographic. I am claiming a comeback and am convinced I will be returning to make the project I initially set out to do - solely dedicated to skateboarding in Gropiusstadt.

Thinking back to the fountain, I also can’t help but find some sense of irony in the situation. Gropiusstadt was designed to be perfect (at least initially), during a time when skateboarding was only used for transporting heavy boxes. The resulting community was thus closed in, and now, quite old, producing a tangible sense of isolation, pessimism and inevitably, failure and dystopia. The weekly influx of skateboarders to session the fountain (which I have later found out to be on the most fun in all of Berlin) brings youth, subculture and activity that reverses this vapid atmosphere and creates harmony. Some marble gets chipped and a few pensioners get upset, but that easily outweighs the creation of a more balanced overall community. Let this be a lesson to urban planners of today and tomowrrow – consider skateboarding.