Nike SB and Beyond, the Finnish skate shop, put out a Dunk High together this summer. It landed here in late July: the Nike SB x Beyond Dunk High Pro.
Pull the insole out, because that is where the whole project is hiding. The footbed is cork, printed with hand drawn pools and one line in red: LINES THAT NEVER END. No coping, no flat bottom, no corners anywhere in it, just a shape that keeps running back into itself.
Beyond put that there, out of their shop in Jyväskylä, and it took them four years and two separate sets of permission to do it. The second set did not come from Nike.
Aalto Said Yes First
Juho Haapala took the idea to the Alvar Aalto Foundation in 2022, and only went to Nike once they had approved it. That order is the whole reason this shoe reads as something other than a brand borrowing a dead architect's aesthetic and hoping nobody writes in. The Foundation signed off on the design, and Beyond say so plainly on their own site.
Haapala described the brief this way: "Aalto wanted to create sites and furniture that stay relevant for decades to come. To follow that philosophy we wanted to create a shoe that stays relevant for at least 50 years."
It is a strange thing to say out loud about a Dunk, and it is also the most Aalto sentence in the entire project.
Noormarkku, 1939
In 1939 Alvar and Aino Aalto finished Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, a house built for the arts patrons Maire and Harry Gullichsen, who had told the Aaltos to treat the whole thing as an experiment. Aalto was moving away from the hard rectilinear lines of European modernism and toward organic forms around then, the same instinct that had produced the Savoy Vase a few years earlier.
The pool he drew for it has no straight edge and no corner anywhere in it. It is a free-form basin with curved walls, shaped to echo the outline of a Finnish lake, which is more or less what he was looking at while he drew it. It is widely credited as the first free-form pool of its kind.
Nobody skated it. Nobody skated anything. It is 1939, and it is a swimming pool at a private house in rural Finland.
How the Shape Reached California
Thomas Church, who was designing gardens in California, traveled to Finland in 1937, where Aalto showed him around and took him out to see Paimio and Sunila. Church went home and his work changed, moving off sharp angles and toward curves.
In 1948 he built the Donnell Garden in Sonoma with a young Lawrence Halprin, and at the center of it sits a kidney-shaped pool, its curve reading as an answer to the salt marshes in the distance. Sunset and House Beautiful put it on their covers through the 1950s, and pool builders copied it into backyard after backyard across the state.
That is the part that usually gets skipped. The shape did not spread because it was good to skate. It spread because it photographed beautifully in a magazine about backyards.
Then the Water Left
California ran dry in 1976 and 1977, two of the driest years in the state's recorded history, and to save water people drained their pools and left them sitting empty.
What that left behind was tens of thousands of smooth concrete bowls with no flat bottom and no straight sections, sitting behind houses all over Los Angeles. The Z-Boys went looking for them, hopping fences in Santa Monica, pumping out the ones that still held water, and riding the walls until somebody called the police.
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Skating a curved wall with no end to it is a different problem than skating a ramp. You carry speed through the turn instead of stalling at a coping line, and once you are moving fast enough on a wall that steep, you come out of the top. That is where aerials came from, and transition skating, bowls, vert and every concrete park you have ever skated trace back through those empty backyards to a curve somebody drew in Finland forty years earlier.
Aalto died in 1976, the same year, and there is no version of this where he knew what the shape had become.
Back to Jyväskylä
Beyond has been open twenty years, and their first shop sits in Aalto's town. His family moved to Jyväskylä when he was five, he went to school there, and he opened his first practice there in 1923 under the gloriously oversized name "Office of Architectural and Monumental Art." The city holds more of his buildings than anywhere else in the world, including the Alvar Aalto Museum, which he designed himself.
So a skate shop in that particular town, putting free-form pools on a footbed, is not a stretch. It is local knowledge.
The references sit on the shoe once you know to look for them. Birch tone on the Swoosh for his furniture, blue gloss at the collar for the glazed ceramic tile in his buildings, red brick underfoot for the brick he built with, and white leather doing most of the talking, because that is what he did.
One thing Haapala did not get was the pool itself. The Villa Mairea Foundation would not let him film there, and he wanted five seconds of 16mm. They said no, he respected it, and he shot everything else.
The edit is worth the four minutes: Eetu Toropainen, Victor Höglund, Eniz Fazliov and friends, filmed by Teemu Metsäkylä, partly on 16mm.
Fifty years is a strange target to set for a skate shoe, when most of them are landfill inside two seasons. But the shape printed on that footbed is eighty-seven years old and still turning up under people's wheels, so he may not be aiming high enough.
Image credits: Villa Mairea pool by Mikkoau; Mike Smith in Palos Verdes, 1985, by Ithaka Darin Pappas. Both via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0, resized, not otherwise altered. Product photography is ours.
The Beyond Dunk is on the wall in Antwerp. Come look at it properly, and subscribe to the newsletter if you want to hear what lands next.