Have you ever watched parkour? I would pay to, if it wasn't so terrifying. It is balletic and athletic. Seen in real life, with kids leaping across vertiginous gaps above London's Embankment, I waver between fear and fascination with a warning on the tip of my tongue - ready to cry out before every jump. I had to walk away to stop myself. Seen on YouTube favourite locations are megastructures, ideally brutalist with cliff edges of concrete. One group, Storror, carry cameras in their mouths so you get stomach lurching shots, jumping with them. But I was caught by Storror action in more mundane territory. In back gardens of thin-skinned, boxy 70s estates dauntless fingers latch onto the narrowest of ledges. And with a swing and controlled scramble they are up and over the wall. On the least promising of facades they have found a handhold. Since the 1960s and 70s, most building facades have got flatter if not thinner, with increasing systemisation. The migration of our language is a reflection of that as walls became facades. Think of the smooth panels of Trespa, Pilkington Planar, Vitrabond; find the system and clip it on. There is no space for fingers here. Yes, we still have window reveals but they seem more like architectural play. In the highly researched, yet curiously primitive, Cork House, the little imperfections of the bonded cork give it a complex texture up close. You would need crampons to climb here, apart from the fact that the architects treated it to the language of structural stone, laid in courses with recessed joints. At speed a traceur (the proper name for a parkour practitioner dontcha know), could make it up to the roof.
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