ARTICLES Archives - Page 100 of 316

Rotten Timing

I had a friend many years ago who tried in vain to persuade me to visit Detroit. She'd grown up there, and despite the city's many problems, she still harbored the born-and-raised view that her home town had so many virtues that simply seeing the place would be enough to win me over. I never made the expansive sightseeing trip she'd always urged me to take - no time for that! But as it turned out, I did manage a short visit not long ago when my flight back from Canada and through Detroit was late enough that I missed my connection to Los Angeles. Making matters worse, it was a weather-related problem and I was far from alone in needing to find both accommodations for the night and another way home. Long story short, I stayed the night in a downtown hotel, and the earliest flight I could book the next day was late in the afternoon. I'd wanted to see Isamu Noguchi's famous Horace E. Dodge & Son Memorial Fountain for a long time, and this was my opportunity: I had breakfast and ventured forth. Nothing worked out on that gray, miserable January day: The weather was horrid, the hotel wasn't convenient to the riverfront plaza where the fountain stands so imposingly, and, topping things off, the whole plaza had been rendered inactive by vandals who had raided its maintenance facilities to scrounge the copper plumbing. So the fountain was as dry as a wet, near-freezing day would let it be and my whole accidental visit was a colossal bust. As a sculpture, however, Noguchi's 1978 tribute to the industrial prowess embodied by one of auto manufacturing's leading families is vastly impressive. It's sometimes said that it looks like a gigantic wingnut, but the comparison is unkind and serves, unfairly I think, to undermine the composition's dignity, grandeur and symbolic strength. And it does stand 30 feet tall, with its fountain basin surrounded by an eight-foot-tall, granite-ringed structure that conceals the nozzles and lends an air of mystery to the fountain works. Apparently there's also a choreographed light display that animates the fountain's surface after dark - again, not something I saw on my visit but which looks awesome in photographs (and in the brief video linked here). All is not sad or lost: I was happy to learn in rounding up images to accompany this text that the fountain is operational again and has had its lighting system upgraded with modern LED and sequencing technology. But I have still only seen the functioning plaza and its various features in photographs: What I recall most is a chill wind so penetrating and miserable that I wondered why I'd ever left the airport. Better luck next time?

Small Space, Big City

The current generation of pond designers and installers tends to think big - often very big - and enjoy pursuing projects on large properties in which the basin and its accompanying streams and waterfalls create spaces so naturalistic that it seems like the water's been there forever. That's a noble goal - and one I pursue frequently in my projects for

Water’s Flip Side

'For years,' wrote Bruce Zaretsky to open his On the Level column in the January 2011 edition, WaterShapes 'has celebrated the beauty, majesty and positive potential of water in the landscape. We've seen it flowing down waterfalls, over vanishing edges, across slopes and through the air. We've seen what happens to colors immersed in it, how it creates shimmering light patterns, how it works its way over stone and, perhaps most important, the

The Big Aquatic Picture

I've written a couple of my recent blogs about public pools, access to them, their cost, their status and my growing concern that, for a complex of reasons, swimming skills and our basic societal inclination to be water-involved is slowly moving onto the cultural version of the endangered species list. It's in this context that I call your attention to

Working with sodium bicarbonate in starting up a newly finished watershape involves more than turning on a tap, concedes Kim Skinner. But once a barrel is prepared, the method is simplicity itself -- and truly kind to new plaster, quartz and pebble surfaces in pools and spas.

Bicarb Start-Up ABCs

WaterShapes recently published a pair of my articles on techniques for filling newly plastered swimming pools with water and starting them on the path to a long, successful service life. In the second of those articles (click here), the focus was on the bicarb start-up method and the effect this approach has on the establishment of a durable plaster, pebble or quartz finish. But rather than being a step-by-step description of how the bicarb start-up works on site, the article was about

Achieving perfection in an all-glass-tile pool/spa project is always a team effort. But in a project as elaborate as this one, notes Jimmy Reed, the nature of the material offers special challenges as he and his expert tile installers work to make the visual magic happen.

Smooth Ambition

Every once in a while, the stars align and we're given the opportunity to pursue and attain perfection in applying glass tile to a beautifully designed and built swimming pool and spa. The project illustrated here is one such case: Everything about it just snapped into place. First, we were asked to join the design team at an early stage, so we had a good level of input on how the pool was to be laid out and its interior surfaces formed; second, the watershapes fit

A Flying Start

I'm going to start the New Year by breaking a personal tradition - and I'm going to do it on a grand scale. As I've written in past first-of-the-year blogs, I'm not inclined to make New Year's resolutions for myself, mainly because when I made them in the distant past, it would generally take less than a

Given all the details that can get in the way of smooth performance, it's easy to see why it's tough to take a watershaping act on the road. The key to success at a distance is, of course, planning, but as Barry Justus reports, it also helps to be patient -- and lucky.

Cliff-Top Performance

Working on the road can be tough. As was discussed in the first of this pair of articles (click here), it can get even rougher when you're working on a cliff in a remote area and have been asked to build a big watershape in a place where all sorts of environmental rules and restrictions apply and there are also plenty of easy-to-upset neighbors. I thought we were ready for all contingencies as we prepared ourselves, the design, the plans, the permits and the site. I was even prepared to deal with the half-load restrictions imposed to protect thawing

Off the Deep End

'A big part of properly designing watershapes to meet specific client needs has to do with understanding how they'll be using the body of water,' wrote David Tisherman at the start of his Details column in January 2006. 'I always explore this issue with my clients, which is why, for

Three Year-End Smiles

Three news stories caught my eye as I began thinking about the completion of another year's set of WaterShapes World blogs. These aren't the usual holiday-oriented/feel-good items, as you'll see. The first comes from the web site of the