Since a rock has no apparent purpose on this earth beyond just being, it’s fair to say that climbing is the interpretation of a rock’s surface through the vehicle of the body. On the other hand, since architectural structures are created by people for specific reasons, such as shelter or bridging a body of water, buildering could well be defined as misinterpretation of architecture…or at least that’s how webmaster Ard Arvin describes the pursuit on his site, buildering.net.
Arvin (not his real name), 33, lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he works as an electrical engineer. His site contains blog posts with videos, photo galleries, a forum, and commentary on the art of buildering. It also deals with rock climbing and parkour. Perhaps the most unique feature of buildering.net, however, is the two Google Map-based buildering guidebooks, one to the Tampa Bay area, the other to the University of British Columbia campus (the latter is a digital adaptation of a 1986 print guide). These guides let you click on individual problems and then show either a photo of someone on the architectural feature or simply give a bit of info and a difficulty rating.
At the start of each guide is a disclaimer: “Buildering always results in serious injury and horrible death. Buildering is illegal. You will be caught, charged with trespassing, and spend years in jail,” adding that, “All media contained within this guidebook is fictional.” Regardless of the veracity of the guidebook’s content, it’s a cool piece of coding, and one that could easily be used for certain climbing areas (the kind without tree cover obscuring the problems/routes on Google Maps). “I really think this technology can revolutionize the way we think of climbing guidebooks,” says Arvin.
To learn more about buildering, the site, and the man behind it all, we conducted an email interview with Ard Arvin.
When did you start buildering.net, and why the .net?
In 2001. I just missed out on registering buildering.com by one week. Some kid from Las Vegas beat me to the punch. Curious as to who else would be interested in buildering, I did some research on the guy. Turned out he had a series of underground videos called The Broken, where he sat on a couch, drank beer, and told people how to hack into things. Then a few years later he started a weekly series of podcasts where he sits on a couch, drinks beer, and tells stories from a social news website he made: digg.com. Yes, buildering.com is owned by Kevin Rose.
What/who is buildering.net for?
It’s for me and the five or six readers of the site. It makes me feel like I’m contributing something to society while simultaneously breaking the law.
You talk about parkour, buildering, and even slacklining on your site...what’s the connection?
They’re fun to do and aren’t golf? I dunno, life is as exciting as you want to make it. Certain things draw me in, while others don’t. I could spout some “freedom of movement and physical expression” drivel here, but I’m just as stoked on playing dodgeball and competitive Scrabble.
Do you climb rocks?
I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, eastern B.C. I used to solo chossy, blasted, roadside cliffs until one day I got stuck and had to do a very long and shaky downclimb. I vowed to never climb again until I learned how to use ropes. When I moved to Vancouver for university, I joined the outdoor club and learned how to do things properly. Conveniently, Squamish, the best rock climbing area in the world, is only an hour away.
Who makes those online buildering guidebooks?
My friend Owen did the programming; I did the content.
What’s the idea behind the guidebooks? Just to spread the good word?
Pretty much everything behind buildering.net is to spread the good word. I’ve considered some ways to make money to at least cover the hosting costs, but I suck at business stuff. Google Adsense gives you pennies a month — yippie! But hey, I’m open to climbing-related sponsors … *wink wink, nudge nudge*
Owen on the other hand has an eBusiness degree, so he’s wanting to completely redo the guidebooks, making them slicker, better, and hopefully make a little cash at it. We’re working on an iPhone app right now.
Have you ever been arrested for buildering?
Arrested but not charged. A few friends and I were out climbing and decided to do a crane swing. A quick how-to: climb a big construction crane, belay at the end of the boom, lower a rope to the ground. Person on ground grabs rope, climbs up crane to top of shaft, belayer takes up slack, swinger jumps. Think King Swing times 10. [Kids, do not try this at home. —Ed.] Anyway, we’d just climbed up and were sussing out whether the swing path was clear when I spotted four police cars headed our way. I could see quite far from up there and they were still about two miles away, but by the time we got down they were on us, guns in hand and dogs on the loose. …They cuffed us, threw us each in the back of a different squad car, then checked to see if our stories matched up. “You are under investigation for Break and Enter, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.” They let us go, and under Canadian law had six months to decide whether or not to press charges. Nothing came of it. Break and Enter was such a bogus charge anyway. We neither broke into anything, nor had to climb over fences/gates to get to the crane. We just walked up to it from off the street.
Describe the hairiest moment you’ve encountered buildering:
Watching a friend fall 20 feet to hard concrete and break his leg was pretty scary. I used to organize parkour outings in Vancouver, until one day a kid didn’t quite stick his landing on a roof gap and almost rolled off of a six-story building. I decided from that moment on that I wouldn’t be putting minors in potentially lethal situations.
Do you think buildering will ever be an above-ground aspect of climbing? One day buildering will become as popular as fantasy football, at which point I’ll sell buildering.net for $10,000,000, retire in Yellowknife, and take up ice fishing.
But seriously, buildering as a sport has been around for over 100 years. I’m not talking about the human-fly sensationalism aspect of it either, I mean climbing buildings for climbing’s sake. I’ve got a guidebook from 1897. I think if it was ever going to become mainstream, it would’ve by now.
If anything, with governments and law enforcement agencies encouraging people to ‘keep vigilant, report suspicious behavior,’ I think buildering will be driven even more underground. We’re encouraging a society of snitches. Just open your Yellow Pages — there are hundreds of snitch lines in there for everything imaginable. It’s getting so bad that law enforcement has had to change their pitch recently. There’s signs all around Vancouver right now saying ‘Report the suspicious, not the weird.’ Seems people are a little too paranoid.
Is buildering as physically interesting as rock climbing?
There’s something to be said for a stellar Squamish granite handcrack that you just can’t find in buildering. That said, there are quite a few buildering problems I’ve found that contain movements you can’t reproduce in nature. When talking about skyscrapers vs. multi-pitch climbing, of course the skyscraper is going to be more repetitive. But, you’ll be hard pressed to find a multi-pitch climb that is as steep and exposed as a skyscraper.
Is buildering, like bouldering, defined by height? I.e., would climbing a 10-story building be considered buildering, or free soloing a building?
It’s all buildering. It’s a shortcoming of the term I suppose. If we really must split hairs, I usually divide things into two categories: lowball stuff and highball stuff. I tend to agree with the great Alain Robert on this one, ‘It’s all climbing.’
Is there a world’s greatest builderer?
Alain Robert is the world’s greatest builderer. He’ll tell you as much. But honestly, the man has climbed more skyscrapers than any man in history. He started out as a famous rock-climbing soloist, and when he discovered there was little money to be made there, he applied his skills to buildings. (Yes, there’s a lot of money to be made from climbing buildings. Go talk to some developers in Dubai.) Robert doesn’t get the credit he deserves from the climbing community. Probably because he’s French. He’s broken almost every bone in his body through climbing, yet he’s still out there free soloing at 47 years old.
Is there a grading scale in buildering? If so, is it the same as the V-scale? There’s no specialized rating scale that I know of. One of the reasons I builder is to get away from that whole scene. I find when it comes to buildering, I can out-climb a lot of people who kick my ass on the rock. Maybe it’s because I’ve developed an unusual set of climbing skills over the years, but likely it’s because I’ve got no idea how hard the climb is supposed to be.
I hemmed and hawed over this issue for the guidebooks, and decided using the ski hill grades of green circle, blue square, and black diamond would be ambiguous enough, yet give the uninitiated a general idea of what to expect. People tell me the ratings are all wrong on the UBC book anyway.
Are there any other good buildering web sites, zines, or books out there?
Pretty few and far between, unless you break into the realm of parkour or urban exploration, with occasional bits of buildering.
Alainrobert.com is good. The video of him soloing with the late great Dan Osman is classic. Petr Kazil from Rotterdam has a site that hasn’t been updated in years: xs4all.nl/~kazil/bilder00.html. This was one of the first buildering websites up, if not the first. There are a few European sites that come and go.
As for books, it’s a goal of mine to collect every book on buildering ever made. I doubt that equals more than a dozen: Night Climbers of Cambridge, Roof Climbers of Trinity, LA Climbs: Alternative Uses for Architecture, and a few guidebooks from campuses around the US. There’s also some fiction where the protagonist climbs buildings: Doorways in the Sand (Roger Zelazney), Nightclimber (John Manchip White), and The Night Climbers (Ivo Stourton).
Is there any buildering-specific terminology that stands separate from climbing lingo?
Trad climbers say when in doubt, run it out. Builderers say when in doubt, run. ‘Oh shit, the cops!’ ‘Security!’ or ‘No, you may not have my ID, Mr. Security Guard’ are all pretty classic.
Do you think the web will help buildering (and climbing) grow in a way it never could have before?
I can see the online guidebook helping a lot. Buildering takes a lot of creativity to discover new lines. I’ve been climbing on the UBC campus for over 10 years and I (or others) still find great new climbs that I’ve walked by hundreds of times before.
Anything you want the world to know about buildering, buildering.net, Ard Arvin, or whatever?
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