Other Waterfeatures (from birdbaths to lakes)
Our involvement with Vera Katz Park started with a phone call from Alan Beard of GBD Architects, a firm that has been responsible for designing several signature buildings in Portland, Ore. The project at hand was the complex renovation and transformation of the city's National Guard Armory into a modern theater and the new home of the Portland Center Stage Theater Company. After an energetic interview process, we were selected to design the site's landscape. We were enthusiastic about the project from the start. The sidewalk area we were designing is an integral part of the redevelopment of what's known as the Pearl District, a former industrial area now being revitalized with mixed-use buildings and high-rise developments. At 200 feet long by 20 feet wide, the space presented an interesting design challenge in an area much in need of parks and public places. The city's goal is to establish pedestrian connections throughout the neighborhood while creating a sense of community within the district. For our part, we saw the site, which was to be named in honor of former Portland mayor Vera Katz, a devoted supporter of the arts who had been instrumental in the repurposing of the Armory Building, as an opportunity to create a
In December 2004, WaterShapes introduced ‘The Platinum Standard,’ a registry of projects that embodies watershaping…
In December 2004, WaterShapes introduced ‘The Platinum Standard,’ a registry of projects that embodies watershaping…
In December 2004, WaterShapes introduced ‘The Platinum Standard,’ a registry of projects that embodies watershaping…
In December 2004, WaterShapes introduced ‘The Platinum Standard,’ a registry of projects that embodies watershaping…
A small town set in the suburban vastness of southern California, the city of La Mirada seems an unlikely setting for a leading-edge aquatics facility – let alone the grand one that now occupies 19 prominent acres within the city’s sprawling regional park. We were first introduced to the project in September 2005 by the city’s public works director, Steve Forster, who invited us to sit in on a meeting to discuss the city’s ambitions. At this gathering, key city officials let us know that they’d already secured much of the $30 million plus the project would require and expressed their desire to begin moving right away with a very aggressive project schedule. What was needed now, they told us, was a company that had
In the often wild and woolly world of custom landscape and watershape design, it’s sometimes impossible to predict the sources of the most interesting and challenging projects – or anticipate how we manage to find our ways into the middle of them. It’s all part of what makes this profession so uplifting at times – and so confounding at others. I’ve worked hard to accept and embrace the strange tides of fortune this business entails. As a case in point, this month (and next) I’m going to relate a story that captures the essence of what it can take to accommodate the unexpected and enlist the nerve it sometimes takes to
People who live in and around Hilton Head Island, S.C., cherish the memory of Charles Fraser, the visionary developer who set the standard for the way communities look along vast stretches of the Carolina coast. Most prominently, he pioneered progressive land-planning standards 50 years ago in developing Sea Pines, one of the first communities to incorporate environmental preservation as part of the development, take its design cues from nature and support the concept with land covenants and restrictions. Fraser’s vision for Sea Pines has since become the foundation for many planned communities worldwide and embodies a philosophy that has, in the intervening years, spread throughout the country. Indeed, our firm – Wood+Partners of Hilton Head – has always endeavored to adhere to this approach in planning communities that are situated in and around natural environments. Most of the time, that means we work (as Fraser did) with water as a central amenity, whether the setting borders a lake, the ocean, a river or a natural wetland area. As we see it, our mission is to preserve and, where we can, even
My dictionary defines a rill as a small stream cut by erosion. In the practice of watershaping, however, that colorful little word has been stretched to cover manufactured channels in which we artfully move water from one place to another. These often-subtle effects have a history dating at least to the 5th Century BC, when Persian kings demonstrated their power over nature by using rills to bring water – a symbol of fertility as well as a practical means of cooling architectural spaces – from rivers and aqueducts to their palaces. These early rills were observed and adopted by Muslim designers and engineers who rose to eminence in the Middle East more than a millennium later and were carried along as Islamic influence spread through India, North Africa and, eventually, Spain, where signature elements of Moorish architecture are still seen today in the famous
Not to diminish the painted ponies of The Wizard of Oz, but Steve Mann’s hydraulophones are horses of a different color. These watershapes come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from landmark centerpieces that have the sculptural grandeur of pipe organs all the way down to water-flutes that resemble brightly colored tadpoles. What’s most remarkable about these devices isn’t just their structural and artistic variety or the ways they look as visual art: It’s the sounds they make. At first, the natural comparison is to a pipe organ, but as you listen, a variety of shadings and other sonic reverberations emerge, slip and slide around you. What’s more, hydraulophones invite people to insert their fingers into the jetting water to shape the sound and squeeze out the shape of each note, and a variety of sonic textures are possible depending upon
