Skatepark designers Nine Yards

0:00Jesper Kuipers:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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0:41Sean Allsop:They're the sounds taking over the world. The sound of grinding rails, the snap of a kickflip and wheels dropping down ramps. It's skate parks. Skate parks have existed for over 50 years. For most of that time, skating was DIY. Underground, unwanted. Skaters found their own spots, built their own ramps, got moved on. But something has shifted. Cities around the world are now competing to build them. There's a boom in demand, and a serious profession has emerged to meet it. The skate park designer.

1:16Jesper Kuipers:You see the sports evolving now. Changing how people see skate parks and how skate parks has to look is also always a mission to change that a little bit.

1:25Sean Allsop:I'm Sean Orsop and you're listening to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service, where we go inside the creative process. Today, I'm in the Netherlands following Nine Yards. This is the skate park design and building company behind some of Europe's most exciting skate parks, including the official skate park for the Paris 2024 Olympics. And right now, they're taking on one of their most personal projects yet. The rebuild of Olympian Plyne, one of Amsterdam's oldest and most beloved skate parks. I wanted to find out what it takes to redesign a space that a community has loved for decades, and how you make it better without losing what made it theirs.

2:11Jesper Kuipers:and I travelled to the workshop

2:14Sean Allsop:where it's no surprise to discover 9-yard designers are skaters themselves

2:21Jeroen Van Eggermond:My name is Jesper Kuipers I'm a landscape architect at 9-yard skateparks We are in the, we call it the headquarters the 9-yards headquarters This is our workshop in Breda in the Netherlands Here we design everything and here we build everything

2:38Sean Allsop:Around me are wooden ramps being built, steel beams being put together and tools of all kinds. I'm excited to be here but I have to confess I'm not a true skater. Like millions I grew up watching skateboarding in games and on TV but I never tried it. That is until skating appeared at the Olympics and I finally took myself down to the local skate park to try it. Now don't expect full flips and a 20-foot drop, but I can manage a pretty sick 180 on a skateboard. But what struck me wasn't really the skating. It was the people. Friendly, welcoming, a real community who helped me on my first step on the board.

3:18Sean Allsop:And it made me wonder how much of that comes from the space itself and from the people who build them. Nine Yards have been doing it for over a decade from this workshop in Breda in the south of the Netherlands, and right now they're running three projects at once. Designing one park, building another and about to open a third. And a lot of that work comes from the workshop.

3:41Jeroen Van Eggermond:We have all the tools necessary to build whatever we want. Every unique obstacle that we design in our office, we can also build it ourselves. We have a lot of tools for this. Quite not enough space. This big beast in the corner you see here, this is a CNC machine a really big one so in essence what it is it is a computer controlled saw machine so we can lay down some wood on it and we draw whatever we want on it and it cuts it exactly to the millimeter any imperfect cut you make in wood for example or in concrete you will feel it because the wheels are that tiny of a skateboard they're like 55 millimeters you feel literally everything so you want all of the obstacles that you make to be perfectly shaped and this machine allows us to do it they cut whatever you want

4:36Jeroen Van Eggermond:we're all skaters ourselves as well so you test the products you make skating ourselves you just

4:44Sean Allsop:know what works it's estimated there are now over 18 000 publicly owned skate parks around the world a number growing fast. But the origins of this boom are unlikely. They didn't start with city planners or architects, but with a drought and an empty swimming pool.

5:02Jeroen Van Eggermond:What happened in the early 70s was that people started skating because it originated from surfing. People started surfing on the streets, you know, that turned into skateboarding. A lot of those guys had no skate parks, so they used backyard pools during a drought in California. There was a drought. but all the backyard pools were not filled up, and they turned out to be perfect for skateboarding. And those backyard pools, they were all very fancy. They were made from shotcrete, from concrete that you shoot and you shape by hand. And that's kind of where the whole shapes and look and feel that we know of skate parks nowadays comes from those times.

5:46Sean Allsop:Skate parks spread throughout the late 70s and 80s, but many were poorly built and fell into disrepair. Skating retreated underground, back to the streets, back to DIY. Then, in the late 90s, came a new wave. And for Nine Yards' owner and designer, Jeroen, growing up in the Netherlands, that wave arrived at exactly the right moment.

6:09Jesper Kuipers:I'm Jeroen van Hekkenbond. I'm owner of Nine Yards, working now for a long time in the skateboarding industry. skateboarding always goes in waves and i think and when i started skating it was big skating was everywhere man in music and on on the television and commercials it was really like uh if you want to be a little bit punky or stand out and you're going to start skating or something you know

6:34Sean Allsop:before the new millennium publicly owned skate parks were practically non-existent The culture was almost entirely DIY. You found a spot, you built what you needed, you made it work. Jeroen was 16 and his dad had a warehouse, which he refers to as the greenhouse.

6:52Jesper Kuipers:We started just skating everywhere and my dad had a greenhouse, like a more space where we could use. When we were 16, 17, 18, we were just building ramps there, you know, of old pallets and sheets of plywood and then skating. We didn't have a skate park, so we built one. Bigger and bigger. First we started a few pallets, then it was a rail, then we had a fun box, then we had a whole skate park in my dad's place, including a DJ boot and a bar and everything. In the end, it was getting more Skatopia than my dad's company.

7:27Sean Allsop:Jeroen soon had nearby villages asking him to make skating demonstrations. He would take his ramps anywhere he was asked to go.

7:35Jesper Kuipers:Just a village called me, oh, can you do a skateboard demonstration? in a city 20 kilometers from here. So we're like, okay, we can do this. But we were still young. We were 16, you know, so we didn't have a license to drive a car or whatever. So in the first two years, my dad, he just drive us around with a car and a trailer every weekend, bringing the mini ramps everywhere. And then we build up the mini ramps, a demo in the mini ramp. And then we called my dad or Hassel's dad Saturday, end of the day, like, oh, the trailer is back loaded. Can you pick us up in wherever we are? and then they pack us up and we did that for I think for a year, a year and a half and after there we're getting more requests of doing similar stuff or building skate parks or really small projects.

8:19Sean Allsop:Jeroen lobbied the city of Breda for six years for something bigger for the public. By the time he was 23, that lobbying paid off.

8:28Jesper Kuipers:And when I was 23 or something, it was all aligned man. Then in the end we found a venue, we found funding, we made a foundation and the city was happy to support us. So we did a lobby for six or seven years. And when I was 23, we opened the doors of Pier 15, like you had a local indoor skate park in Breda.

8:47Sean Allsop:From that base in the historic Dutch city of Breda, 100 kilometers south of Amsterdam, nine yards grew from a local skate park into a full design and build company, taking on projects across the Netherlands and beyond. Then in 2021, skating was confirmed as an Olympic sport for Paris 2024. The Games would need skateparks, built at Place de la Concorde, one of the most famous public squares in the world. The company leading the design was California Skateparks, the American firm who had been building competition courses for decades. Jeroen wanted Nine Yards to be part of it, so they sent 20 or 30 emails and waited.

9:30Sean Allsop:It worked. Nine Yards became California Skate Park's European partner.

9:35Jesper Kuipers:The first build we did was in Rome, in front of the Coliseum. There was also an Olympic qualifier event. And then we just started from there, you know. They sent us the drawings, we produced 50 % of the course, making the rails, templates, wood templates, send over some crew, bring all the machinery, tools. Super nice experience also, you know. First skating your dad's greenhouse, and then later being in Paris, just an iconic spot building an Olympic skate park. For me, it was just a really cool adventure doing it, creating together and sharing projects together internationally. And a lot of people are also inspired by each other.

10:16Jesper Kuipers:So I think that's the cool thing about skate park building.

10:20Sean Allsop:From Paris, 9 yards have come home to Amsterdam and to one of their most personal projects yet. Olympian Plain has been a skating spot since the 1970s. It started as an unofficial space. It got a concrete design over 20 years ago. Now, the city wants to rebuild it, and nine yards have won the contract to do so. But redesigning a space that a community has shaped and loved for decades carries its own pressure.

10:47Jesper Kuipers:For Olympia, it's the same, you know, because it's a piece of city owned by skaters or by users, and it still is, you know. and then now also the city invest in a better facility and in the end i don't know you can build the best facilities you can put a lot of money in facilities but in the end you can buy culture or community you know so people still have to adapt what you build so if you if it's not done right then nobody goes to the spot so it's also pretty fragile you know you have to build build it right respect the heritage make sure that everybody is happy with what you're doing and And then you can make really cool spots where people can have a good time, you know.

11:28Sean Allsop:The process starts, as it always does for nine yards, not with concrete, but with paper.

11:33Jeroen Van Eggermond:This is kind of the design office, where we start with designing. And everybody that's sitting here is kind of involved in the design. I think what you see behind me here is just loads of sketches. sketch paper posters because that's pretty much where we start with every single project yeah these are some of the first sketch designs we made for the Olympia Plein and now looking back at it it's pretty funny to see how much has changed and also how much has kind of stayed the same this is a funny thing this sketch design was not well received at all The skaters in Olympia Plein, they have a really emotional connection to the space.

12:26Jeroen Van Eggermond:It's what makes it so beautiful and still so popular, but also what makes it very difficult to redesign. What we noticed after making this design is that they really don't want anything to change.

12:38Sean Allsop:The park has its own language. It's one that takes years of skating to learn to read.

12:43Jeroen Van Eggermond:So the scale of this park is pretty big. then there's this thin line that's a rail here when you have those kind of stripes it is called transition so that's a quarter pipe for example or a bank so that's curved transition or straight transition and then yeah those are i think the main element you have plateaus transitions and then some obstacles like rails or ledges or mani pads or curbs, all between them. We sit down and we just start sketching. And this can go on for a couple of days or weeks in some case. And then we just take whatever we find good in each of our designs. And that's really how we go forward.

13:34Jeroen Van Eggermond:We just make different iterations, different versions constantly.

13:38Sean Allsop:This is the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service.

14:08Jesper Kuipers:better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

14:18Sean Allsop:I'm Sean Orsop and I'm following the skate park design company Nine Yards. But a skate park design isn't just about individual features. It's about how they connect. Nine Yards call it flow and it's what separates a great park from a forgettable one. We can pretty much,

14:36Jeroen Van Eggermond:if we see something like this the top view we can already pretty much see and feel how it works we try to read the flow already on the sketch design like this so we can visualize how this would skate how this would work and also how maybe other skaters of higher level or lower level would use it you need to have skated in your life otherwise it's very hard to visualize and actually make a design that works does it have a dead end or does it actually present an opportunity to continue through the rest of the skate park and does it give an opportunity to maybe turn around and hit a different obstacle so that's the essence of flow is that from one part of the skate park you should be able to reach the other side and go back and do that in maybe a hundred different ways

15:30Sean Allsop:Literally, is it inches you guys measure everything to?

15:32Jeroen Van Eggermond:Yeah, millimetres. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything is millimetres.