A friend recently sent me a video of a DJ. I really liked it, both musically and visually, and so I went through some of the other recordings that this DJ had on his YouTube page. They included this one, recorded at an outdoor amphitheatre, as well as a number of others recorded at various festivals. Most of these shows featured the elaborate decorations and light shows that have become the signature of EDM concerts. More than any of these, however, I liked one that had been recorded at a less assuming venue, a converted printing plant in London. Conversion and repurposing of old industrial buildings of this kind are common, but Printworks seemed unusually successful in that it retained and incorporated much more of the older furnishings, machinery, and floor plan of the original building. The elongated corridor, lined with its original elevated walkways on the side and towered over by a ceiling still equipped with rigging, created a space that complemented the music better than any of the purpose-built stages.

Things can and often are repurposed or adapted out of necessity. Sometimes the “right” tool isn’t available; sometimes the owner is simply loath to dispose of something whose original use has become obsolete. Apart from these more practically motivated scenarios, however, there is also intentional repurposing. Ironically, having tools that are too adapted to the purpose can detract from the experience. This is especially true of special tools that are very specifically engineered for a discrete task. They do accomplish that task, but also remove all friction. In contrast, there’s pleasure in using a tool that requires a certain amount of skill to manipulate. The creative act of figuring out a different, less conventional way of doing something is also rewarding. One thing I’ve observed is that the more skilled or advanced someone is in a domain, the less likely that person is to use custom tools and the more likely he is to get by with ordinary or reimagined ones. One of the best players I play tennis with, I noticed, doesn’t use a regular dampener; he instead ties a thick rubber band to the strings. Dampeners are extremely cheap and available, but the rubber band, undeniably, has a flair that the dampener can’t hope to match.

A similar phenomenon exists with skateboarding. In the heyday of skate videos, when companies and teams produced full-length films, there was a general unspoken rule that no footage should be filmed at skateparks. Every clip had to be from a “street spot”, that is to say a spot in the city that wasn’t built for skateboarding. It could be a staircase, a traffic bump, or just some random gap between concrete structures. Barcelona in particular became famous in the skateboarding community. Skateboarders were wont to observe that the urban planners and architects of this city had unwittingly created an urban landscape better than any skatepark. But even if a skatepark with matching features were built – and no doubt many have been – it wouldn’t matter. The very fact that Barcelona isn’t a skatepark was and is an integral part of its appeal.

Romance, in the narrower as well as the broader sense, is associated with a lack of practicality. The overly safe, adaptive tools or places purpose-built for a certain use lack romance. Even on a linguistic level, there is something irredeemably dissatisfying about a name that too literally or directly describes what the thing in question is or does, such as a winery with the word “grapes” in the name. There is an irreplicable charm to the impracticality of using something for a purpose other than that for which it was intended but to which it is suited.