You'll find few people with more genuine love for skating than Jim Barnum. Of course you'll also find few people willing to admit to seeing the movie Marley and Me, let alone saying it caused them to question their accomplishments in life... but that's what makes Barnum so damn cool: he's the real deal, through and through, and is sincere to a fault when anything up for discussion connects back to skateboarding.

Barnum, who's been skating for the past 24 years, founded Spectrum Sk8park Creations in 1997. Based in North Vancouver, BC, Spectrum is proudly 100% skater owned and operated, and offers start-to-finish skatepark services, ranging from planning and design, to final construction and park maintenance and everything in between. The first park that Barnum and Spectrum designed was in Whistler, but the company has since been responsible for skateparks across Canada (including my current favourite park in the Toronto area, at Warden and Ellsemere, not to mention the much-loved Vanderhoof).

Jim Barnum. George Faulkner photo.

Spectrum's mission statement, found on its website, sums up Barnum's design philosophy nicely: "We believe that skateparks should be accessible, fluid, and dynamic arenas that inspire skaters of all ages and styles to become well-rounded riders and people. With creativity, a knowledge of skateboarding's past, a commitment to progressive skatepark design, and a deep understanding of the timeless ideas of balance, fluidity, and continuity in design, Spectrum is creating an enduring legacy for skateboarding's future."

I caught up with Jim with a more specific goal in mind: to find out where skatepark design is heading, and what his favourite park features are, both as a skater and designer. I just never thought (spoiler alert) that his answer would reference alligators and pits full of spikes.

So Jim, what is the most frequent design request you get these days?
Here's what's awesome: that's a hard question to answer these days because design requests are all over the place now. A few years ago, it would have been way easier to say, "Oh yeah, the most common request we get is just for a six-set with hubbas and a rail." Today though, it's not an easy answer because we are getting such a huge variety of requests, even for stuff that's completely out of the blue, and has never been in a park before.

So for us, a skatepark company that places huge importance on creativity, not just pumping out stock parks, this situation rules! It makes designing -- and of course the end product, the skatepark -- so much more fun. It seems like skateboarding is past its adolescent years of being really close-minded and judgmental...now it seems like everyone is down to skate everything, or at least to respect all types of skating. To me it feels like we're back to real skateboarding, the real culture of freedom and creativity that drew me to it in the first place.

Anyway, if I had to narrow it down to the most frequent design request, I'll name a few: we still get the decked out six-set, actually. Step-ups are still really popular. Manual pads, flat bars... It's still the staple elements that are asked for the most. So in spite of the fact that we get tons of different requests these days; the staples are still the foundation of our parks, which is as it should be. That stuff is staple for a reason.

Millenium Park, Calgary, AB. Brendan Sohar photo.

How do you balance our a design that is "of the moment" but will have a lasting quality, so that people will still want to skate it in 10 to 20 years?
That's a really complex question with a lot of ways to answer it, but one of the most fundamental ways to ensure that a park will always be fun to skate is to focus heavily on lines and flow. So long as a skater can experience flow, and really get the feeling of shredding, a park will always be fun.

The feeling of flow, whether it's flowing through the streets hitting whatever you see in your path, or on some luscious bowl trannies, is one of the things that everyone who skates loves. I think that the experience of flow accesses something really deep inside us, something that connects us to our true nature: energetic, effortless, totally free, powerful... experiencing flow while skating can help connect us to our true nature.

What was the question? Oh yeah, ensuring that our parks have great flow is how we create timeless skateparks. Another great thing about skating is that skaters can adapt to almost any terrain; that's part of the creative aspect of it. I think that skating and skaters have developed to this certain point, and become sophisticated enough, to where anything that we create today that is truly killer, will also be super fun to skate 20 years from now. By "truly killer" I mean something that really works, with flow being a key part of that working or function.

Markham, Ontario. Jim Barnum photo.

As a skater, what is your favourite style of park?
I'll just say this: I love skateboarding. I mean, I am crazy over it, totally obsessed with it, I can't stop thinking about it, and honestly, not many things rank higher in importance to me. I went and saw the movie Marley and Me with my girlfriend recently, and there's a point in the movie when the main male character turns 40. He's sitting on the beach with his dog Marley and says something like, "So, how does it feel knowing that your best years are behind you? Did you do everything you wanted to?" And that really affected me! Pretty funny to be doing a life-reality check in a dog movie, but that's how it goes... Anyway, it made me ask those big questions of myself, which is pretty intense! And honestly, to me, the biggest things that I haven't done yet are almost all in skating. I've lived a great life and done a lot of good living, so it felt like one of the only things I would regret not doing later in life would be not reaching my full potential as a skater. I am literally just as happy shredding a two-sided curb in a dank parkade in the middle of winter, as I am riding a mind-blowing bowl in the summer sun. The most honest answer to "what's my favourite type of terrain", is whatever is in front of me when you ask.

North Van Plaza, Vancouver, BC. Mark Vaughan photo.

On the other side, as a designer, what is your favourite type of feature to design and build right now?
I have the most fun with plazas right now. Skaters have become highly discerning; really knowledgeable, sophisticated and very demanding of perfection in plazas. So there's a lot of pressure to do great things, which forces us to go off.

And there's loads of room for creativity in plazas. Of course the skate-able elements themselves can get really crazy and unique...really sculptural and complex when you start looking at crazy spots and sculptures and architecture all over Europe and all over the world for inspiration. But then there's even room for massive creativity in the layers of detailing that make the place look and feel legit, like a real street skating experience. So I mean, thinking more like an architect and using a more holistic design perspective, and using lots of different materials like tiles, brick, granite, acid-etched and stamped concrete, steel, plants and whatever else we find.

As any skater knows, plazas are about a lot more than just replicating street elements in their functional form, or coming up with creative new Euro-inspired spots. Plazas are also hugely about the feeling, really making the plaza come alive. One of our design team members, Derek DeLand, wrote something like: "The key is that street skating is as much about creativity and urbanism as it is about sport, with the skateboarder using their board as a tool to read and re-read multiple alternate meanings from the fabric of the city, a creative cultural act as much as an athletic one. Thus the identity of the plaza as readily identifiable ‘urban space' is central to the meaning of the act of street skating in such a plaza, and thus the success of any such facility." So clearly, with an idea as vast and true to skating as that, plazas are freaking insane amounts of fun to design.

Commons Skatepark, Halifax, NS.

That being said, where can we skate a Spectrum-designed plaza?
You'll have to wait and see, ‘cause most of our newest plazas aren't built yet, but start by checking out the new Hamilton plaza, or our Brampton park which actually just won an architectural award -- and Grant Patterson said it was one of this top three reasons he missed Brampton in an issue of SBC Skateboard, which is amazing to hear -- and Ashbridges Bay in Toronto... if it ever gets built! When Ashbridges is done, I want people to remember that we designed that park in 2005 -- four years ago -- and it'll still be cutting edge when it's finally done.

Where do you think skatepark design heading? What do you predict for the future?
We're working with a team of theoretical physicists to develop the bottomless pit. It's a pretty complex physics and math situation... Seriously, though, maybe this is the answer to the first question about what skaters are requesting most these days. There's almost always some kid who asks for a bottomless pit to gap. You wouldn't believe how much that comes up. It's that or a pit full of spikes. Or alligators. That's the answer to that question about our most common request: Alligators.

-----------------------
Related:
In The Park: Vancouver Plaza
In The Park: Leeside
In The Park: Mapleridge, BC