Moving Toward Fruition

Eric Herman

In my role as editor of WaterShapes, I’m often approached with tales of utterly amazing projects in the works – but still months or even years away from completion. That can be frustrating at times, because the only way to satisfy my piqued interest is to wait things out until the time finally arrives when we might get the privilege of covering the results in these pages.

These experiences in learning to master my impatience have gone a long way toward proving to me that anticipation can actually be a wonderful thing. This issue, for instance, carries a prime example of the way this education can pay off in the form of James Altas’ “Shell Games” (click here), in which a Chicago-area builder begins two-part coverage of a project of mind-bending complexity and scope.

More than five years in the making, the project had been in the works for quite a while before I heard about it from my friend Nick Powell of Craig Bragdy Design (Denbigh, Wales). He visited our booth at a trade show and went off about this great installation with an indoor pool where a giant clamshell had been made to hang out over the water at one end. He told me that his firm, which makes fantastically colorful, textured ceramic tile, had been engaged to create an iridescent mother-of-pearl tile mosaic to finish the underside of the shell.

In months following this conversation, reports of this project seemed to multiply as I began to hear from anyone and everyone who’d been involved with it on any level – and even from people who had simply heard about the crazy pool rigged out with the clamshell. As the project finally neared conclusion, Nick referred me to James Atlas, the watershaper who’d been asked to turn this flight of fancy into reality – and that’s where the story began showing its full extent and complexity.

As James explains in his article, the clamshell is only part of the deal: The project was being done at the request of a woman who brought a huge stock of creativity to the task and was obviously accustomed to allowing her imagination to run wild. What’s more, she had the vision and the wherewithal to indulge the most outrageous inklings and impulses.

In that sense, this is a project that, from start to finish and probably beyond, has been about the power of visualization: From the most elaborate of designs to the most modest, this ability to anticipate a result and use that anticipation to pursue just about any sort of imaginative concept is one to be greatly desired – a must for design professionals and also a helpful characteristic among clients.

That’s not to say that just because someone can think of an ambitious idea that it necessarily can or should happen, but there can be no question that for a highly creative idea to become a real as a watershape, a watershaper’s clients must have some ability to visualize outcomes and subsequently grant themselves and those working on their behalf the freedom to follow those paths.

In this case, James describes a path that would test the limits of his technical capabilities – making this a story of the power of visualization as well as one of the dogged persistence required to make concepts come to life.

extension, this is why anticipation can be so exciting: It’s an agitated state of mind where the powers of inspiration and execution meet – and it goes a long way toward explaining why I have so much fun following along with all of you because I have no idea when or where the next wild idea might start on its path to fruition.