Participatory Environments with Alexis Sablone

How can we design more active and engaging cities? Drawing from experience as a professional skateboarder and designer, Alexis Sablone reflects on how movement shapes the way space is read, used, and reinterpreted, and how those ideas carry into their design work.

About Alexis Sablone
Alexis Sablone is an architect, designer and multidisciplinary artist, as well as a professional skateboarder and Olympian. They hold a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Masters in Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were both the Ida C. Green Fellow and recipient of the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize. Much of their work brings together their two worlds of architecture and skateboarding through the design of hybridized playscapes and large scale interactive sculptures in an ongoing exploration and interrogation of public space. Skateboarding, if nothing else, has provided an interesting case study for designers, as skate spaces consistently show themselves to be creatively used, shared and beloved by a broad, diverse and growing community. This diverse usership—cutting across spectrums of skill level, age, race and gender—demonstrates the potential that public play spaces hold, not just for skateboarders, but beyond. Alexis is currently a fellow at University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Art’s and Inquiry, where last spring they co-taught a course about the intersection of skateboarding culture, performance and urban space.

This program is in conjunction with The Kinetics of Urban Movement, on view at the Architecture Center Houston from June 18-September 26.

Image: Candy Courts model. Courtesy of Alexis Sablone.