Skate Nation

Spread across Architerra's conference table are plans detailing the various design stages of the Westminster skatepark, the company's latest project, due for completion early next year. The plans evolve from pencil-drawn sketches to prints marked in red pen to final technical blueprints. Westminster originally hired Architerra to design a skatepark back in 2000, then scrapped that plan after Vans, the skateboard shoe company, opened a 55,000-square-foot indoor skatepark at the Westminster Promenade. But that state-of-the-art facility -- with its $15 entry fee -- couldn't compete with Colorado's plethora of public skateparks, which were not only free, but didn't have the "tranny nannies" who enforced Vans' strict pad-and-helmet requirement. After the Vanspark closed in 2003, Architerra was brought back on the job.

Architerra began the design process, as it usually does, by conducting a series of workshops with local skaters, BMXers and Rollerbladers, trying to get a general consensus on what the Westminster park should look like. (Out-of-state, skater-owned firms might hold only one workshop before coming up with a final plan; Grindline didn't hold any face-to-face meetings with Trinidad skaters.) The Westminster skatepark meetings were advertised in the city's community newspaper as well as on its television channel. Fliers were also posted at two local skate shops, and boarders from the far corners of the Front Range managed to show up.

The skaters who attended those meetings fell into two categories: thirty-something skate veterans and junior-high grommets who got their first boards last Christmas. Such a split in age, skill level and terrain preference (big, vertical transitions versus curbs and small stairs) can make integrating everyone's needs a challenge, says Pearson. And some skaters have no clue what they want. "You'll literally get an eight-year-old kid who says he wants a twelve-foot half-pipe and he's never skated a six-foot half-pipe," he points out. Since the older, more experienced skaters know what they're talking about, "often in the skatepark process, we'll zone in on those older guys and get some of the details from them."

In Westminster, one of those guys was Jason Heidecker, 33-year-old skater, ramp builder and electrical engineer with the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder. Heidecker can often be found riding around local skateparks with a calculator and notepad in hand, taking down figures on radius, height and distance. He's assisted several landscape architects with skatepark design, offering technical advice and even submitting AutoCAD drawings. He doesn't get paid for the hours he puts in or get credit on the final product. He does it "because I hate seeing crappy skateparks," Heidecker explains. "I think it's horrible. It just bums me out that much when I go to skate a park and I'm not even stoked because it's not laid out right and I have the ability to look at it and think, 'Oh, man, if I could've moved this just twenty feet over, it would be all right.'"

While Heidecker thinks the construction quality of Architerra's skateparks is first-rate, the layout and dimensioning of obstacles can be a problem -- particularly at the firm's parks in Castle Rock and Littleton. "They put things in places where you can't hit the obstacles," he says. "Like a pyramid that you can hit from one way but can't from the other because they put a stairway there."

The Emage Skateshop is just two blocks from the Denver Skatepark, so Sean Robinson is very familiar with Architerra's work. "They have the right ideas," he says. "But it's just not the right angles, not the right height on the ledges for how big a bank something is." In 2002 Robinson and his Emage partner, Branden Peak, helped Architerra with the second phase of the park -- a $1.1 million, 10,000 square-foot expansion of the street course that would give Denver the largest public skatepark in the United States.

Robinson and Peak, both street skaters, were so alarmed by Architerra's first draft that they submitted a different design. "We gave them full CAD blueprints with cross-sections, everything you could imagine," says Peak, including a petition signed by over five hundred skaters.

"And Architerra basically ignored it," he adds. "They changed a few things, but not enough to where it works. Now there's so many elements in that new section that don't even get skated because they're unskateable."

Robinson remembers stressing the importance of getting the correct angles of the hips, "and that just didn't happen. There's one pyramid with a flat bar on top of it that's up against a wall with a weird tranny thing going up to it," he says. "That should've been a mellowed-out flat bank. So it's kind of like nobody can skate that thing, you know?"

Skaters also complain that Architerra's parks lack discernible flow. At the recently opened park in Federal Heights, skaters often run into dead ends and approach unusable obstacles. The Architerra-designed Lakewood park, according to a commentator on the Denver Skatepark website, is "a bit like Frankenstein's monster" because so many elements are inexplicably tied together. "This is what you get when you try to please everyone," the poster notes.