“I have a primitive need – to give form. The feeling of belonging to surrounding environment gives me comfort. This is the moment when I can work freely. Without unnecessary and additional limitations. There’s just me, material, and the physics. I feel it’s purifying and, at the same time, a good chance to train ideas.”

Janne Saario’s words can either relate to his passion for skateboard, art or landscape architecture, all of them revealed by director Yves Marchon in his short movie about Saario’s project Steel Park – Second Nature.

Saario started to skateboard when he was 6 years old, which took him, he says, to wonderful places around the world and let him meet dedicated and genuine people. Skateboarding has been a way of expression for him and a starting point to spread creativity and transfer it to art and architecture.

One can see how inseparable are these activities and way of living, for Saario, along the movie – his heartfelt narrative is an invitation to his imaginary and to his feelings about how skateboarding can nourish creativity and community laces.

Steel Park for the Swedish city of Lulea is the epitome of his belief. What outlined his design was the architectural usage of old industrial elements, transporting some of the city’s heritage to a public space and giving it a new function and meaning. The park is now an important meeting point for the local community.

Second nature was premiered in 2012 in Helsinki, Saario’s home town, in Finland, in the same year that the city was elected World Design Capital.

“Second Nature” A Documentary Film About Janne Saario from ELEMENT SKATEBOARDS on Vimeo.