Fountains
Starting in 1661, Louis XIV of France began a building project at his country estate in Versailles that would keep him busy throughout what remained of his reign. He held on all the way through until 1715, so he had a good, long time to browbeat large numbers of architects, designers and engineers into making the chateau a statement of power, wealth and majesty befitting a man who called himself Le Roi Soleil
David L'Heureux For much of human history, those with power and wealth have been willing to put both on display in the places they choose to reside. There are palaces and great houses all over the planet, each one testifying to the grandeur of its owner and the talents of the architects and designers brought in to turn grand visions into actual structures and garden spaces. Often, those commissioning these conspicuous projects were members of
No matter where you turn these days, you'll find watershaping experts preaching the gospel of balanced hydraulics. In class after class, text after text, they all say that if you do exactly the same thing on one side of a tee as you do on the other, you will get the same flow on both side of that tee. If, for example, two main drains are connected to a single tee with pipes of the same length and diameter and the same fittings, those drains will both draw equal amounts of
Water in the open basins that commonly surround fountain jets or nozzles is never tranquil while these systems are in operation. It will slosh around in response to the upward thrust of those jets or nozzles as well as the splashing the rising water makes as it drops back into the basin. If the circumstances are right, this disruptive splashing will produce waves in a distinct, consistent pattern. By exploiting these waves, it's possible to produce an effect I find
In recent years, cities across the United States have found that restoring their old train stations is a great way to attract people and commerce to downtown districts that have seen better days. These revitalization projects have picked up the pace in cities from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and they seem to work best when old, original functions are preserved and mixed in with the new.That's precisely the direction that redevelopment of Denver's historic Union Station has taken: The classic, Beaux Arts-style building, which opened in 1914, lost almost all of the
In my experience, watershapers have a tendency to focus a bit too narrowly on one or another aspect of the craft - some on pools and spas, others on ponds or fountains. You get the idea: In speaking with clients, there's an inclination to play to one's strongest cards - and I think that can be
These days, it seems like just about every homeowner wants to get something special with their pools and spas. More often than not, that means some form of water in transit, whether it's a cool spillway, a vanishing edge, a bubbler on a thermal shelf - or, as in the case highlighted here, some sort of jet that will
Consider this scenario: A company you've worked with in the past calls your firm in to work on a project. You're told the setting is magnificent: You'll be working with a huge sculpture in the most prominent position in front of one of the most renowned sports stadiums on the planet - all of this in a city that prides itself on brilliant architecture. The job is yours, but here's the thing: The client is the wife of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and he's not supposed to know what's really going on out front of his own stadium until an unveiling ceremony scheduled for his birthday. And it gets better: The call comes at the end of April and the unveiling ceremony will take place in October. To say it's a fast-track project would be putting it mildly. Once the design was finalized, we were to have ten weeks to turn approximately a million and a half pounds of concrete, steel and stone into a working fountain. And along the way, the stadium was to host a range of events - a Monster Truck Jam, a FIFA World Cup Soccer qualifying match, a Professional
Some projects carry obvious prestige, and this is one of them: The pair of reflecting pools and the sculpture that rises above them stand in front of AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas - home to the Dallas Cowboys and, several times a year, host to nationally televised football games. But certain of these prestige projects take on extra dimensions - and this was one of them, too: The mirror-finished dish that surmounts the watershapes
In July last year, the city of Chicago unveiled its newest civic landmark: Millennium Park, a world-class artistic and architectural extravaganza in the heart of downtown. At a cost of more than $475 million and in a process that took more than six years to complete, the park transformed a lakefront space once marked by unsightly railroad tracks and ugly parking lots into a civic showcase. The creation of the 24.5-acre park brought together an unprecedented collection of
