Denver skate park

Denver Colorado has the largest, free, outdoor park in America (as of 2007). For our scale modeling class at the Art Institute of Colorado our team (Joe Tonseger, Josh DeLatorre and Myself) decided that, rather than doing a standard architectural piece such as a bridge or a building, that we would recreate the Denver park.

Aerial view of Denver park.

We began this project with multiple site visits for reference photos, measurements and color studies. We also needed to secure a meeting with the company who had designed the park to get permission to copy and use their blue prints.
After this was done we had to figure out how to go about actually building the park in a timely manner, all told we only had about 9 weeks for the project (time that also had to be shared with our other classes). After our teacher (he ran a model shop for 8 years) held up his hands and said "good luck" when we asked him for guidance we finally decided on using an acrylic sheet for the base of the park, this became ground level, and from here we either built the features into the base or on top of it. The acrylic also served as the foot print for the model.

The bowls (all of the recessed features) were all milled out of twenty lb. foam. The remainder of the features were laser cut from acrylic or hand formed from 20 lb. foam.

Foliage was applied to foam wedges, after it was sized appropriately, and inserted into the base.

After all of the parts were test fit a base coat of primer went on, then it was time to start painting and peopling the model.





After everyone was moved in the park was open for business!