Word: skated
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a skate-park building boom going on right now, and new lines--the kind that skaters course along and the kind that designers draw--are what it's all about. "Five years ago, there were 200 skate parks," says John Bernards, executive director of the International Association of Skateboard Companies. "Today there are over 2,400, with many more under construction." During those same years, skate-park design reached a plateau of sophistication that you might not have expected from guys who wear really baggy shorts. As skaters have moved into the role of designers, establishing firms like...
...same way that skateboard style has influenced clothing and graphics, the new parks have begun to grab the attention of designers in other fields. Architect David Rockwell, designer of the Nobu restaurants in Manhattan and the set of the musical Hairspray, says skate parks, with their use of "the continuous ramp that leads you through a series of adventures," were an inspiration for a new playground he's working on. Joe Ragsdale, who teaches landscape architecture at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo, says that every year his students come up with different ways to provide ideal flight paths...
...wheels to short boards so that they could retrieve on dry land just a bit of the feeling they got from a wave. In no time it had evolved into an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style. Skate parks, which first appeared in the 1970s, started out as places meant to draw skaters away from the respectable concrete of downtown. But those early parks tended to be melancholy stretches of concrete with a few bowls and half pipes--that's a semicircular ramp--thrown in. The merest parking...
...reasons that no one has ever fully explained, skateboarding made a comeback in the '90s, and with it came a return to the construction of skate parks--safer places that usually required helmets and elbow pads. Park "design" tended to be contracted out to sidewalk-concrete pourers, playground-equipment manufacturers and lowball bidders. Most had never set foot on a skateboard, much less done a 360 on one. The results were uninspiring. To an intrepid teenager, a mass-produced ramp is about as exciting as a documentary on the Federal Reserve System. Thrasher, a skating magazine, spotlights the worst parks...
...essential element of most great skate parks is the bowls--rounded craters that can be as deep as 12 ft., which skaters can barrel down, building enough speed to coast along the walls and climb the rim. All bowls--round, oval and peanut-shaped--are descended from the ur-bowl of skateboarding, an empty swimming pool. But park design has moved far from the basic pool formations. "Now it's about taking those and intersecting them," says Hollyday. "I have to keep thinking of the next shape...