Finnish Modernist architect Alvar Aalto accidentally invented the skateboard bowl with a 1930s swimming pool design, according to a US skateboarding magazine and a Finnish newspaper.
Alvar Aalto's seminal 1939 Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, features the world's first kidney shaped swimming pool and was the precedent for a rash of similar designs in the US, according to Transworld Skateboarding.
The pool is also significant for its rounded floor and change in depth from one end to the other, creating a bowl-like effect at the "deep end" that would become key to an explosion of illegal back-garden skateboarding sessions and trick developments during the 1975 Californian drought. Transworld Skateboarding broke into the pool to skate it for the first time after spotting an article in Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, and published photographs from the session this week.
"It might be the swimming pool that changed the history of skateboarding," said Helsingin Sanomat. "Until then, swimming pools were traditional rectangles, but the pool at Villa Mairea doesn't have any angles in the pool."
...