In 1896, the American architect Louis Sullivan wrote that a building's shape should emerge from its purpose rather than be dressed up to disguise it — a principle he called "form follows function." The phrase outlived Sullivan's own buildings, picked up decades later by Bauhaus designers who sharpened it into doctrine, and eventually landed in mid-century furniture and industrial design as shorthand for a whole worldview: that an object's honesty could be read in how little i

Most mornings, Scotty runs a kitchen. As a Sous Chef at Nike’s World Headquarters campus outside Portland, he works in an environment where timing is everything and the team moves as one. About a year and a half ago, with his wife’s encouragement, he went back to something he’d loved even longer than cooking: fingerboarding. He soon started making his own decks. That led him into Portland’s small, generous fingerboard scene, and gave him a quieter kind of work: one person, on

It's been a while since we sat down with a collector for a proper, unhurried conversation about fingerboarding. For this episode of Collector's Appreciation, we spoke with Justin, known to many of us as Nash @nashville_fb. Nash first picked up a fingerboard in the late '90s, back when the shelf held only a handful of options and Tech Decks were just arriving. He returned to the hobby during COVID, and his collection has since grown in every direction: hard-to-find OG Tech Dec

I left my place to catch a flight to Toronto at four in the morning, which is to say it did not really feel like a departure so much as a continuation of the night before — that particular fog of being awake for a reason you chose, willingly, because the thing on the other end of it mattered enough to justify losing the sleep (and a few extra cups of coffee in between). Toronto, when I landed, offered no reward for the effort. The sky was the color of a chalkboard that had be

Knife Manufacturing Company was named as a joke. It is, by its founder Andy Eclov's own admission, a word that has no business sitting next to the phrase miniature skateboard — aggressive, out of place, slightly absurd. Eight years on, the joke has held. So has the brand. Conceived in 2018 as a provocation, Knife was built to fill a hole its founder had spent years staring at: a fingerboard industry that sold craft where he wanted brand, hand-sanded sincerity where he wanted

Where is the limit for fingerboarding to expand? Personally, I don’t think there is one. When you find a spot to fingerboard—whether it’s a perfect marble table or a rough concrete ledge on the street—if the four wheels can roll, that’s good enough for us. This brings us to our topic for this episode of Designer’s Ethos: the relationship between fingerboarding and architecture. At first glance, they may seem like unrelated worlds, but this article seeks to uncover the deep co