A Watershaping Reformation

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Those words (originally uttered by the fictional newsman Howard Beale, for those of you who remember the movie “Network”) reflected the frustration of a man overwhelmed by the forces that governed his working life and the society in which he lived. His declaration became the rallying cry of a movement that formed around his sense of outrage.

I’m in that same sort of outraged mode right now and find myself on a similar quest for allies: I want the watershaping industry to change now and for the better, but what I see instead are people “waiting it out” until the market gets better and the world decides to hire us again. I don’t know about you, but I believe that tough times call not for submission, but for direct, provocative and forceful action.

Waiting won’t help us get beyond our industry’s predicament, which predated but has definitely been exacerbated by the current economic crisis. Trouble is, our watershaping gene pool is so degraded these days that pulling ourselves out of our greater, longstanding mess seems difficult to the point of impossibility.

It’s the sort of situation that makes it tough to stand in front of classrooms of landscape architecture students and persuade them that they need to know all they can about watershaping – that this knowledge will be valuable to them in their careers. Here I am, doing my best to attract sharp young minds to the industry, and the industry returns the favor by making me so mad at it that I wonder if I’m doing the right thing in being so persuasive.

It’s time, I think, for a Reformation.

ROCKY CURRENTS

My jaundiced view of the watershaping industry began to develop long before the economic downturn. For decades before 2008, I watched as trade associations and major suppliers basically told us what to design and what to build – and reinforced their domain by handing out awards to those who played by their rules.

Certainly when the economy was booming and home-improvement or commercial-development funding could be found simply by getting up in the morning, many of us were lulled into a false sense of security. But with the pressure of the past year and more, we can now see that the rules by which we’ve been cajoled into playing have left us without revenues, without business stability and without the skills needed to refocus and find ideas that will save us.

It gets worse, because in our weakened condition, we’ve had our cages rattled by the federal government and local municipalities about drain configurations – the upshot being half-baked laws that came with no consistent interpretation or ready means of compliance.

If you doubt that, just ask two plan checkers or inspectors from the same department to explain the Virginia Graeme Baker Act and what it means: Chances are better than good that you’ll get two completely different readings. It’s not their fault, really: The rules are thin and enforcement is as varied as the information and instruction officials have been given – which is nothing at all in many cases.

To be honest, pool-code management has never been either objective or consistent: All of the noise about the Virginia Graeme Baker Act has only brought those basic flaws rampaging to the surface.

The pain of all this has all been compounded by the fact that our industry’s leading trade association backs educational programs that are really nothing more than marketing agendas: They don’t succeed in teaching anyone about the dynamics of design or construction; instead, they’ve fostered an army of drones who see watershaping as a simple exercise that involves working off sets of templates and calling in subcontractors to repeat the tasks they performed last time and the time before.

That’s all well and good in boom times, but it’s not exactly a visionary perspective – and it certainly hasn’t done anything to prop up watershaping to withstand current market conditions. And now, to put the cherry on top, I get notices on my material invoices that product costs are rising? Shouldn’t the opposite be happening in a supply-and-demand economy? I get it, of course: The powers-that-be are asking that survivors carry them until things get better.

I can’t help noticing that what they’re doing makes no sense at all. I may be naïve in saying this, but at a time when the love of money isn’t working as a strategy, isn’t it time to develop an affection for something else?

AQUATIC DESIGN

For the most part, future landscape architects receive little (if any) education about water. Without that education, they come out of school and look to the building trades for support and ideas – just as they do with drainage and irrigation – and get caught in a product-based design process they can’t seem to avoid. There’s no innovation in such a “process,” and it’s absurd to call it “design.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that landscape architecture is a bastion of innovation. In fact, it’s largely filled with people who accept conventional thinking and don’t buck when they encounter limitations. When those rare and wonderful students come along who do want to escape the trap, however, there’s almost nowhere for them to turn.

Under those circumstances, substantial numbers of these new practitioners do what landscape architects have done for generations as a result of being burned by their dealings with pool builders: They leave water out of their projects or hold their noses and accept the fact that the watershapes they get will not be all they would be if they were fully integrated into the design program.

This point underscores a basic imbalance: As I see it, most designers intuitively understand the emotional need to enhance and beautify spaces as well as to get paid for their work. As a rule, builders don’t share that sort of infatuation with their profession, and that’s a shame because I think the lack of emotional involvement leads to apathy and acceptance of the status quo.

The result of that dynamic is that landscape architects don’t know enough about building watershapes, builders don’t know how to design watershapes – and the industry that surrounds both is consumed with worry that there’s nobody out there to buy its products. What a predicament!

Even when the economy was good for everyone, this was a flawed foundation for the industry – a failing that’s high among the reasons why the watershaping industry has never been held in high regard within the architectural trades. Yes, I’m mad as hell, because I like working with water, enjoy teaching about its uses and want to be part of an industry that radiates confidence and enthusiasm about its potential. Instead, I’m stuck with a bag of nails and no hammer.

When I speak to future landscape architects about the watershaping industry, I have a tough time explaining away the fact that there are so few crusaders and real visionaries out there who will help them in their pursuit of liquid perfection. As a landscape architect and pool builder, I have a fondness for both professions – and reservations about them, too. I see where they’ve done great things right alongside their deficiencies, and mostly what I want to do is elevate both of them as arts and crafts.

Trouble is, very few watershapers see things this way or find any value at all in the notion of advancing the whole industry. Instead, too many are singularly focused on their own progress, with little or no regard for the larger, water-oriented family of which we all are a part. As I see it, that sort of rugged individualism leaves us little or nothing on which to build a respectable profession.

PROGRESS

How do we change this? With the sales of watershapes dramatically (some would say tragically) down from where they were a few years ago, we are at a crossroads and, I think, must choose to develop new strategies and products. When we innovate, we lead – and we desperately need to lead right now.

We also need leaders, so I propose that we reach out and teach anyone, from any background, whatever it is they need to know to create better watershapes. Landscape architects are eager to learn, which is more that can be said for most branches of the watershaping tree, but they’re not the only ones out there.

I say we shake all the branches – the ones with architects, service technicians, city planners, general contractors, fine artists, interior designers, even homeowners on them. What if we empowered them to generate designs that helped us all financially? Would that be so horrible? After all, they possess skills and knowledge that are in thin supply in our own industry: I see nothing wrong with expanding our industry’s designer demographics, especially when the alternative is circling the wagons and dodging incoming fire.

I’ve always felt that such an expansion of awareness and participation would help everyone. It’s a liberal posture for a businessperson to take, but if openness produces profit for all of us, shouldn’t we all be pleased with the outcome?

Here is the crucial part of this idea: If we are to recover financially, then we need to encompass all of the watershaping community and broaden it. We also need to establish some sort of forum for designers, builders, manufacturers, regulators, money people and, yes, consumers to establish procedures and guidelines for this broadening.

I see suppliers as a bottleneck here: They’ve never been known for their community spirit and tend instead to isolate their preferred clients by giving them trips or discounts or special warranty extensions. The regulators are a hurdle as well, especially in jurisdictions where the show is run by people who know little or nothing about building watershapes. As designers and builders, however, we have the ability to overcome both obstacles – and indeed must do so to improve our industry and the realm in which suppliers make products and regulators oversee their installation.

To do so, of course, we watershapers must step up our game. The concept of being able to hack your way through a project will come to an end as the general public becomes aware of how things should go. Look at what Home Depot has accomplished: Before its emergence into the world of end users, there was a certain mystery to obtaining drywall, for example, or electrical supplies. Now almost anyone can build a complete home by paying attention in a Home Depot or one of the other big supply houses.

How long would it take for watershape construction to become that transparent?

In this new situation, watershapers can maintain their roles only by elevating the qualities we currently posses that make each of us unique and valuable. It will be a world in which an understanding of design, materials, safety codes, construction and proper project management are so well structured and so far beyond what the general population can accomplish on its own that we could demand more for our work and ensure long-term success for all of us.

SOLUTIONS

I know that I’ve ranted and maybe even raved a bit here, but this has all been about stimulating thought and getting us to break out of bad habits that are dragging so many watershapers down. It’s time to stop perpetuating methods of operation that blossomed in the 1980s and have left us high and dry in 2009. It’s time to establish a real forum that will help us plan our next steps and approach the future with hope and ambition rather than fear or apathy.

A complete Reformation of the watershaping industry is needed. No bandages will fix it: We need to rebuild it from the ground up.

My call to arms is this: I say we should assemble a diverse body of people and start open discussions the likes of which we’ve never witnessed before. I’m not after a marketing strategy or tips on code compliance or a debate over pricing structures. Instead, I want to convene a Water Council and start discussing where we all want to go and what we need to do to get there.

We need to get creative and stop relying on conventional wisdom and existing hierarchies. Personally, I’m heading in new directions all the time and have started performing work that, even six months ago, I would have walked away from as being outside my scope. It’s a new perspective that has actually enhanced my core services and improved my overall situation: Change makes sense to me now, in other words, and will result in exponential growth when the economy gets better, as it always does.

Outside my own business, I’m focusing all the energy I can on teaching designers how to lead projects rather than complicate them. I also spend time brainstorming with colleagues about new products that will help the environment at the same time they result in revenues – the opposite, I think, of taking an old product and relabeling it as “green” or “eco-friendly” and foisting it off on the marketplace.

It’s time, I think, to come clean and say that our old ways are actually old. In that light, change is not a bad thing: I remember running around with a pager and a roll of quarters, stopping by payphones to answer countless calls that could have waited. Cell phones have helped our businesses, made travel safer and kept us in contact with our loved ones in ways we never could have imagined.

As I was writing this column, I became aware of a presidential summit meeting on healthcare issues held in March 2009. Attended by congressional leaders, representatives of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, union leaders and corporate executives, the session was all about pulling off the blinkers and viewing common problems from new angles.

Especially in times of crisis, such councils allow everyone to speak up and be heard. Out of these processes come reports and action plans that tend to be set aside unless there are leaders within the councils who insist on making things happen. Not to seem more idealistic and altruistic than I know I’ve seemed so far in this column, but it’s time for us to sound the bell, gather at the table and get to work.

Ask yourself this: Are you better off than you were three years ago? If you say “no,” you’re among those most likely to have an opinion of how things should be changed. So let’s hear it: Send me an e-mail directly ([email protected]) or send it to WaterShapes ([email protected]). It’s time: Raise your voice above those we’ve heard from over and over again.

Let’s make noise – and maybe figure out a time and place where we can gather and shape a better future for watershaping!

Mark Holden is a landscape architect and a landscape and pool contractor specializing in watershapes and their environments. He has been designing and building watershapes for nearly two decades, and his firm, Holdenwater of Fullerton, Calif., assists other professionals with their projects. He is also an instructor for the Genesis 3 schools and at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. He can be contacted at [email protected].