Wally Hollyday: Skate Park Designer

Here is the transcript of our interview with Wally Hollyday, designer of Columbia’s skate park plan.

How did you get into designing skate parks?
Wally: I was a skater, and I came out to California to tour the parks and was really disappointed with what I saw and I ran into someone that was doing a demo and I ran into someone that was trying to build a skate park and they didn’t really know what they were doing. I got the opportunity to go over there the next day and they had the contractor there building it so I learned about building parks and it came out pretty good. There really weren’t skaters involved in building skate parks at that time, oddly enough, and it came out really well. The fact that I was I skater got a lot of publicity.

Where are the skate parks you’ve designed?
Wally: They’re all over the place, mostly in California, but that’s mainly because most of the parks are being built in California. Each park is unique and unique to the area from skaters’ preferences, but they also have a lot of common things. Some of the common elements are providing variety, and there’s a lot of different ways to address skaters, but I would say the one common thing I do in all the skate parks is to address a variety of users of different ages, different age groups. Skate parks basically exist for recreational skaters; that’s why these parks and departments are putting them in. They really want something for young kids to do. Young kids are attracted to it because of the extreme nature of it and the excitement of it. When it comes down to it, it’s a recreational facility and it has to be able to address that, but also because skaters progress and are so progressive in their learning and devote so much time to it, that they become very good quickly. The skate park has to work on the recreational facility in terms of kids hanging out like a community center, but it’s also got to address how extreme skaters can become in a short amount of time. That’s the common thing you try to address in all the skate parks. There are infinite ways to address that, but that’s the common thing I try to address.

Have you seen other groups like Pour It Now?
Wally: There’s always some kind of movement that created the skate park. It’s always some young kid who got the idea going by going into city council with a bunch of signatures from their teachers, parents, and friends. They go in and say, “We need a skate park. We’re out on the streets and we have no place to skate.” That’s almost always where it starts or it’s a parent who does it, or its a recreation department head who knows a lot of skaters and sees a lot of kids out on the street with no where to go. He sees we’re addressing all these other kids and we’re not addressing them. There’s always someone or some group that’s directly connected to the skaters. Small towns are the best, because they’re the ones where you get the park directors that know the kids, and they say, ‘These kids need some place.’ They champion it, so if the park director commits, it becomes his project and his goal to see it and it’s an easy jump to the council. A lot of times you have to start by convincing the recreation department that this is something they should be addressing, and that always comes from the kids and from the parents of the kids.

How does a skate park serve the community?
Wally: I think the most important way a skate park serves the community is as a community center, as a gathering place for skaters and non-skaters. The kids are attracted to the skate park and it gives them a place to hang out and a place to develop an identity, a place where they belong. Those are all important to young teenagers, particularly young teenage boys. They need a sense of identity. They need to feel comfortable in a place; they need to get that ownership. The community center, the skate park is an ideal thing. To think that some community centers just have ping pong tables inside. That just doesn’t work for most of these kids, but the skate park, if you think about it, here is something where even kids who don’t know how to skate are drawn to it. It’s an opportunity to reach kids from the other recreational sports. I think that it’s a great thing to communities and I think a lot of people identify that with lots of crazy people. The truth is it’s kids looking to get into something and skating’s a great thing to get in. Once you get in it and once you get around it, it’s all about what can you do, what kind of tricks can you do, how good are, what kind of things can you skate. You gotta put the time in it to do that, so all of a sudden all of the kids who were drawn to it because it’s trendy or it looks cool or gave them the identity that they wanted; now they gotta put the work in it. It’s hard work. They act like they’re just crazy and doing stuff, but it’s really hard work and takes a lot of devotion. Next thing you know, they’ve accomplished something. As a community center, they’ve got all kinds of things that recreational departments set out to accomplish, and you can do that with a skate park. Almost every skate park I’ve done, cities have said they’ve never seen as much usage out of the dollars they put into it. You look at a typical community center, you’ve got a big building with bathrooms, you’ve got all these facilities and what are they for? Just to have a place for kids to hang out and where they can feel safe and come in contact with a skate park. It all goes into the facility itself and it still does all those things. They’re extremely popular and extremely well used in terms of the money the city’s put out for them compared to some other recreational facilities.

How does the community watch over their skate park?
Wally: Most of the skate parks are self-run, self-policed, and if you’re gonna be drawing a lot of different kids of different age groups to one place, there has to be some kind of at least informal supervision. That usually comes from the older skaters, and that plays into one of the things I like to address when I design the park – to make sure there are facilities and features there that will draw older skaters or parents, ideally both. You want to put it in a location where parents are comfortable hanging out and have something to do so they can watch the kids without cramping their style. You want to make it so there is casual spectator space, but you also want to make it so there are features that the older skaters like, so the older skaters can come in there as parents, because a lot of older skaters have kids and will go skating with their kids. The kids will hang out with the other younger kids and the parents will skate the features designed for them, but they’re there. Both the younger kids and the older kids act better around each other, particularly if there are some parents around who skate. Again, drawing all these kids to one place, but making sure that’s an appropriate place to draw them to and making sure there are appropriate kind of influences there. You don’t want to draw these kids to bad neighborhoods and then have bad influences affecting the kids. You want to draw them to good places where there are positive role models around such as parents that skate. You have to think about that; it is a recreational facility and these are just young kids. They’re not gang members or something; too many people fall for the stereotype and that’s not who these kids are. It may be a look or an act or identity but they’re still for the most part just young suburban kids, looking to have some fun. Too many people think skaters are real tough, because they do these amazing things and they are some of these kids.

What is the relationship between skateboarding and art?
Wally: There’s definitely a relationship between design and art. The one thing I try to do in design is design things that are functional and then those functional things, whatever form they take, whether it’s artistic or not, you have to judge that. I think one thing that lends itself to viewing these things more artistically is all our influences aesthetically pleasing designs. For one thing, swimming pools; if you look at a backyard swimming pool and the kind of shapes and forms they are, there’s no practical reason for them to be shaped like that. They’re formed like that because they’re these vessels filled with water and they’re trying to aesthetically suggest something to you. They’re inviting, come get in this liquid thing. They’re fluid shapes and those aesthetic things work in skating – the more geometrical shapes, like they use in street skating. There’s an aesthetic appeal to them that originally appealed to the skaters. The aesthetic appeal of way things tend to be in skating better thing to skate. From a design point of view, I don’t like to get caught up in artwork that’s skateable, because I think that gets you off track. What I do look at is it aesthetically appealing; are these shapes that invite people to want to get in them, ride them, use them, pay attention to them. There are many things you can take from art, and I did study art, so I have a good understanding of the process that you go through when you’re creating something. I use some of that in the design, but I try not to get lost in the fact that I’m trying to create skateable art. I don’t really like that concept, because I think things are much better – for instance, look at architecture. You create architecture for its aesthetics and its functionability and the way it affects things and then later someone can come along and say, ‘This building is a piece of art.’ If you set out to do that, I think you’re putting one thing before the other, and you need to go out and do your job, which is design a skate park that functions. Part of that function is the aesthetic. You put all those things together and someone can come along and go, ‘Why isn’t this art?’ I went to the Temporary Contemporary once and I wasn’t building skate parks anymore, but I spent a lot of time down in dirt holes, shaping out these huge clay shaped things we pour concrete into. It was very much a thing I enjoyed, being in that hole shaping it out. It was a very sculptural type of thing to me, and I went to the Temporary Contemporary here in Los Angeles and they had someone who dug a hole in the ground. They broke the concrete and they dug a hole, and I just looked at it and said, “That’s not a very nice hole.” I started looking at the aesthetics of the guy’s hole. I think anything can be art; it’s the way you perceive it. Just because it functions really well as a skate park doesn’t make it less artistic. If it looks artistic and doesn’t function as a skate park, that’s less viable to me

How did you start working on the skate park in Columbia?
Wally: The city put out an RP, which is a request for proposals and we responded to that. It’s a selection process. It wasn’t where they specifically came to us and said, ‘We want you to do it.’ We were maybe one of a group of designers they had on their short list, so they liked our proposal best.