Natural Inspirations

Eric Herman

Through the years, a number of key themes have almost effortlessly woven their ways into columns and features published in WaterShapes. Some of these include the value of design education, the significance of familiarity with art history, the importance of materials selections and the virtues of sound hydraulic design, to name just a few.

Another theme that stands among the most common of all our overarching concepts has to do with how nature can be used as a source of creative inspiration and for direct design guidance. Quite by coincidence, this particular theme is prominent in this issue in three distinct and very different contexts.

First up is Brian Van Bower’s “Aqua Culture” (click here), in which he discusses a recent trip to Hawaii and how studying the waterfalls of Maui and Kauai offered him models he intends to use as a custom watershape designer. What I find fascinating is that Brian identifies insights about nature as being applicable not only in projects where the idea is to imitate nature, but also in architectural designs where he can translate lessons learned about scale, sounds and sensations of discovery found in nature into key details within distinctly man-made environments.

Next comes Rick Driemeyer’s “Safe Havens” (click here), in which he takes Brian’s observation of nature in a completely different direction while describing projects in which he deliberately creates habitats for use by various creatures including frogs, turtles, birds, insects and, of course, fish. applying extensive, painstaking observation of natural water, plants and rock formations to his work, he manages to create spaces animals will approach and be happy to occupy.

Finally comes “Malleable Permanence” (click here), in which Matt and Paul Doolin of Topanga Art Tile & Design discuss how their childhood experiences in nature – particularly a diving trip to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – have inspired their work ever since in creating vivid ceramic-tile representations of underwater scenery, botanical forms and various organic patterns. All, they say, has been directly inspired by time they’ve spent out and about in nature.

These discussions come at observation of nature from widely different perspectives and will actually lead you in quite different directions, if you’re so inclined. But taken together, I see them all as making a case that, whatever your chosen path beneath the watershaping umbrella, there are some concepts that transcend distinctions among professional activities – the fully engaged appreciation of nature being one of them.

Another facet of this common ground worth mentioning is that, in all three cases, these professionals express how useful it is to spend time studying the ways Mother Nature does things while also expressing, in highly personal terms, just how fun and fascinating it can be.

As suggested above, such testimonials are nothing new to these pages and will certainly be part of other columns and features in the future. My basic point is that some ideas are worthy of repetition, and those who repeat them are offering advice that’s well worth taking!