Our Newest Parkour Park: Cordata Park!
By Colin MacDonald
Bellingham, Washington has an amazing new park. Along with its hiking trails, playgrounds, and bike features, this park is something new to Washington State: a parkour park.
Parkour is known as a street sport. Parkour athletes search their cities for promising handrails and walls to leap across and flip over. As the sport grows, more cities are beginning to build amenities for parkour alongside skateparks and basketball courts.
The parkour area is just one piece of the surrounding Cordata Community Park, designed by the landscape architecture firm of Robert W. Droll. Extensive trails joined by bridges weave through a rolling, grassy wetland dotted with ponds and filled with birdsong. At the north end, the parkour park joins a playground, pump track, and outdoor fitness equipment in the park’s active recreation area.
Colin MacDonald, the design director of Parkour Visions, says parkour parks offer an inclusive gathering place for this young community. “Parkour can be intimidating when you’re starting off, especially when you’re unsure of your skills,” he says. “Parkour parks are places where people of different ages and abilities can meet up and train together.” This park is built with progression in mind, MacDonald explains. “If you see a big jump up high, look around and there’s probably a similar jump a bit shorter and closer to the ground.”
Obstacle courses tend to have a linear, A-to-B layout, but parkour athletes rarely stick to straight lines. “The whole point of parkour is coming up with your own paths and challenges, and that makes parkour tricky to design for,” MacDonald says. “Dense structures give people lots of opportunities to be creative, but too much density gets in the way of the powerful jumps and swings people love doing.”
Cordata park is now open! Bellingham residents can try out some parkour moves themselves, or just sit back and enjoy the show.
About the Author
See more of Colin MacDonald’s park and playground design for Parkour Visions, and follow @pkv.design on Instagram to see his latest work.