Fountains
When people ask me how long it takes to create one of my sculptures, I sometimes like to answer, "My whole life." I've always loved art and started collecting it while still in high school, but I never imagined in those formative years that I'd become an artist myself. After all, I have no formal training, and to this day I can't draw - not well, at any rate. My first career was as a computer programmer, my second as a marketing consultant - both distinctly sedentary occupations that led me to seek something physical to do in my spare time. For whatever reason, I decided to try my hand at sculpting stone, crafting a few rough pieces and taking pleasure mostly from the hard work they involved. Right from the start, however, people
For the last few months, the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., has hosted a special exhibit called "Stories in Stone," which is all about the nature, preservation and conservation of stone mosaics found in the ancient Roman cities of North Africa. Even a quick walk through the halls is enough to show why these art objects speak to us across the millennia: Their colors are vivid, their decorative capacity is amazing, their durability is unrivalled and their sheer beauty is a delight even to the unschooled eye. At best, tile mosaics of any caliber are both aesthetic and functional, timeless and contemporary, subtle and dramatic. They are also versatile - interior or exterior, commercial or residential - and have long been among the very best media available to designers and architects looking to infuse their work with the
For the last few months, the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., has hosted a special exhibit called "Stories in Stone," which is all about the nature, preservation and conservation of stone mosaics found in the ancient Roman cities of North Africa. Even a quick walk through the halls is enough to show why these art objects speak to us across the millennia: Their colors are vivid, their decorative capacity is amazing, their durability is unrivalled and their sheer beauty is a delight even to the unschooled eye. At best, tile mosaics of any caliber are both aesthetic and functional, timeless and contemporary, subtle and dramatic. They are also versatile - interior or exterior, commercial or residential - and have long been among the very best media available to designers and architects looking to infuse their work with the
It's amazing how the traditions of art and craft tracing back through centuries still inform today's designs. That's particularly true in the field of garden ornamentation, where modern statuary, fountains, vases and seating elements take their cues from original works found in ancient Greece and China, in Renaissance Italy and France - and from just about every other era and location around and between. This depth of available imagery is both a boon and a challenge to those in the business of supplying garden ornaments to today's architects, landscape architects, watershapers and their clients. There's just
Sometimes you just know that a client is going to want something special - something nobody else has. I can think of no other entity that better fills that bill than the Walt Disney Co. Justly famed for its remarkable creativity, spirit of innovation and ultra-high standards for design and execution, I knew going in that working with this amazing organization would mean coming to the table with strong ideas, supreme self-confidence and a demonstrated willingness to test boundaries and perform beyond expectations. Our firm, Captured Sea of Sunset Beach, Calif., was founded with those exact qualities in mind and a mission to create fountain systems throughout southern California that are distinctive, unique in concept, superbly engineered and built to last. Through the past eight years, we've been fortunate to tackle several projects for Disney in southern California. In each case, they were looking for watershapes that would delight visitors while enduring the rigors of heavy-duty use and near-constant operation. The call about the fountain featured in this article came in late summer 1999 from Glendale, Calif.-based Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), the remarkable division of the company responsible for designing its theme parks and attractions. They told us that they were
Sometimes you just know that a client is going to want something special - something nobody else has. I can think of no other entity that better fills that bill than the Walt Disney Co. Justly famed for its remarkable creativity, spirit of innovation and ultra-high standards for design and execution, I knew going in that working with this amazing organization would mean coming to the table with strong ideas, supreme self-confidence and a demonstrated willingness to test boundaries and perform beyond expectations. Our firm, Captured Sea of Sunset Beach, Calif., was founded with those exact qualities in mind and a mission to create fountain systems throughout southern California that are distinctive, unique in concept, superbly engineered and built to last. Through the past eight years, we've been fortunate to tackle several projects for Disney in southern California. In each case, they were looking for watershapes that would delight visitors while enduring the rigors of heavy-duty use and near-constant operation. The call about the fountain featured in this article came in late summer 1999 from Glendale, Calif.-based Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), the remarkable division of the company responsible for designing its theme parks and attractions. They told us that they were
The shopping mall as we know it first emerged in the United States in the 1960s and since then has become a dominating retail presence on both the urban and suburban scenes. They started out in larger cities but soon were found just about everywhere - indoors or outdoors, small and large, visually appealing and, well, less visually appealing. Some are organized around upscale shopping and recreational activities, others around discount centers and manufacturers' outlets. There are many that are filled with mom-and-pop boutiques, while a few are integrated with amusement parks. Whatever seems likely to succeed, mall developers have certainly been willing to give it a whirl. At their core, however, every mall of any type has the primary mission of pulling people together so they can spend money on all kinds of merchandise; all the entertainment, dining and socializing are, in other words, secondary activities. In this sense, today's retail forums are a modern version of marketplace traditions that reach back to ancient times and almost every human society - with lots of modern conveniences added for good measure. Today's malls, in fact, are
I've always been conservative when it comes to guaranteeing my work, which is why I only offer a 300-year warranty on my sculptures. I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of my pieces will last well beyond that span, but there's always the possibility one might be consumed by a volcanic eruption, blown up in disaster of some sort or drowned when the ice caps melt and cover the land with water. Those sorts of cataclysms aside, it's hard to imagine that the massive pieces of stone I use to create what I call "primitive modern" art will be compromised by much of anything the environment or human beings can throw at them. Ultimately, that's one of the beauties of working in stone: It possesses a profound form of permanence - and there's a certain comfort that comes with knowing my work won't be blown away by wind, eroded by rain or damaged by extremes of heat or cold. And given the fact that these pieces are so darn heavy, it's safe to say that most people are going to think at least twice before trying to move or abscond with them. Beyond the personal guarantees and despite the fact I don't dwell on too much, working with stone also has a unique ability to connect me and my clients with both the very distant past and the far distant future. Human beings have been carving stone for thousands of years, and many of those works are still with us in extraordinarily representative shape. There's little doubt that those pieces
The plaza island at Columbus Circle in New York is an example of urban and civic design at its best. Encircling the heart of this grand space is a subtle fountain system that has turned a busy traffic hub into a welcome gathering place for the city’s residents and visitors. Here, principal designer Claire Kahn Tuttle of WET Design in Sun Valley, Calif., describes the project and the philosophy the company brought to bear in bringing it to fruition. Tradition has it that, in measuring the distance a place is from New York, the geographical tape measure is placed at the center of Columbus Circle. This makes it easy to see this southwest corner of Manhattan’s Central Park (and the intersection of Broadway, 59th Street and Eighth Avenue) as the true heart of the city. A massive 70-foot obelisk topped by Gaetano Russo’s statue of Christopher Columbus has stood at the center of the bustling traffic circle since 1892, when it was installed to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the explorer’s arrival in the Americas. The circle itself was part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s
If ever there was an example of the power of simplicity, it's been the rise of what we call floating-granite-ball fountains. They've been around since the early 1990s and are now found in a range of commercial and even residential settings. I hadn't ever seen one when I joined HydroDramatics back in 1996, but I do know that soon after I started we began receiving a steady flow on inquiries about them - and it wasn't long before we received our first commission for a floating sphere for a major automobile manufacturer in Detroit. As has been the case every time a prospect has asked about one of these fountains since then, school administrators wanted
