The Colour Blog

Yooooo, welcome to my second blog about one of my all-time favourite side quests, climbing. These Dynamic playgrounds are blends of form, function, art and athleticism. Read this with your eyes and learn a bit about some of my favourite geometric jungles.

I grew up in a household of yogis and ode Noam Chomsky heads. So naturally when I told my parents I wanted to fulfill my stereotypical Canadian white boy destiny of playing hockey, I think they were horrified. Their son was going to be playing a sport where you had to hit someone to win. I took up climbing in 5th grade because I think it was legitimately the exact opposite. Climbing and hockey in tandem was a healthy lifestyle. It was a balance between a culture based on adrenaline and hot-headedness and chilled-out gurus with abnormally strong forearms.

I stopped climbing around 7th grade because hockey got too intense. But recently since I have gone to McGill in Montreal, Montreal’s Montrealness has brought back the forearm freak that I once was as well as a newfound love for the vibrant geometric spaces I grew up in.

Talk about adaptive reuse, in Manchester England and Portland Organ gyms have pooped up in abandoned churches. In both cases, these gyms were heavily involved in the restoration of the church and allowed the preservation of these historic structures while addressing the changing needs of the community. They created a synthesis of old and new aesthetic appeal while improving sustainability in the process. Also, just look at how sick it is when the geometry of the two spaces mix. These gyms are perfect examples of fusions between angularity and cooler taken to the highest level of coolness.

If someone ever asked me to define colour blocking I would just show them a picture of a climbing gym. To me these walls seem like they have a character, they are bold, uplifting (pun), and energetic. Every colour has a meaning, whether it’s to highlight a change in the severity of an incline or to signify the difficulty of a specific route. Whether the big colourful blocky slopers or the small dot crimps it all combines into a beautiful mosaic of functional saturation.

These walls or whatever you want to call them are just plain cool. In the Netherlands, some sick people decided to just put a pillar in the ground. It’s called Excalibur because it’s supposed to resemble a sword, but to be honest, I don’t see it. Regardless, putting a 37 meter big thingy in the earth for people to have fun on is superrrrr valid. The wall you see on the right is in Switzerland and it’s the biggest in the world. It’s on the side of a bloody dam and is probably the scariest thing you could climb with a rope. Again It’s a wonderful example of how space can be transformed to maximize shenanigans. These two walls are lovely demonstrations of people thinking how awesome of a thing can we make, it’s what I enjoy writing about, It’s cool, rad, noice and all the associated adjectives.

Climbing is an extremely expressive sport, the way you move, the moves you make, whether you are dynamic or static climber, it all contributes to your own personal style. Climbing in spaces like these feels like a fusion of expression between the route setters guiding your movement, the architects creating templates, the walls, and the intricate ways you choose to climb. These walls are a woven tapestry of rich creativity and intricate symphonies of artistry (that is a joke sentence I wanted to see how corny of a conclusion I could make).

This is why they are sick