Projects - Structures
Site Structures: Skate Parks

Scott Carpenter Skate Park, Boulder, Colorado

Carson Skate Park,
Greenwood Village, Colorado

Redstone Skate Park,
Highlands Ranch, Colorado

Eastman Skate Park,
Windsor, Colorado

Laramie Skate Park,
Laramie, WY

The explosion of recreational activities along the Front Range has created a need for cities to provide safe, interesting places for the many skateboarding and BMX biking enthusiasts. When these five communities developed skate park ideas, they sought input from the skating community in neighborhood meetings facilitated by expert skate park designers, and LORIS provided engineering design services.

The key engineering challenge in the design of skate parks is to ensure that they don't become buoyant and rise up out of the ground. Skate parks are like swimming pools without water in them. If groundwater levels are high, uplift hydrostatic forces tend to want to float the concrete bowls, so drainage systems to take groundwater away are integrated into the design to relieve these forces.

With shotcrete technology, some complex and challenging geometries for bowls and tricks areas can be built. To achieve a smooth skating surface, joints are minimized and differential slab movements are eliminated through reinforcement detailing across any necessary joints. Other traditional concrete features such as stairs and ramps and retaining walls are integrated into the design of each park, many of which include pipe features on the upper surfaces for the skaters to grind on.

Each of the parks is wildly successful, with high attendance in nearly all weathers.