ARTICLES Archives - Page 113 of 315

Edgy Issues

Even after all these years, in which countless seminars and classes have covered proper techniques for designing, engineering and building vanishing-edge pools, I am still all-too-frequently confronted in my role as a construction-defects expert witness by installations that are just plain wrong in one way or another. The biggest problems usually have to do with the

Envisioned Environment

No matter how firm a focus you maintain on making a pond into a safe, comfortable home for frogs, there's always the need to keep at least one eye (if not both) on the way the pond looks. My goal, as I discuss in some detail in the video linked below, is to make every watershape I produce look as though it belongs where I've put it, as though the pond

Ripples #104

'Touch the Wall': Missy Franklin, Kara Lynn Joyce Swim on Film

The Aquatic Quiz #15

In Hot Water: High School Teacher Drags Screaming Student into Pool

With watershapes, observes Jim Wilder, the beauty often often runs much more than skin deep. To illustrate, he discusses twin works of the plumber's art -- with, by his calculation, more than 750 glue joints each -- that he knew would ultimately be hidden within tons of concrete.

Burying Masterpieces

When I listen to people as they stare at a fountain, I often hear them say, "How wonderful!" In witnessing that praise, however, I know for a fact that what they find appealing is the gracefulness of a sculpture or the beauty of the stone or tile finishes or the way the water flows - what I refer to as the fountain's "façade." In many cases, what's behind that façade can be pretty mundane: maybe a small pump, some simple plumbing, a cascade head or sconce and little more. In other cases, however, what's going on behind the surface is

Ecosystem Design

As mentioned previously in this video series, one of the key points distinguishing frog ponds from most other modern backyard ponds is the fact that there's no circulation system of any kind - no pump to keep the water moving, no skimmer or filter to help keep it clean. That fact puts quite a burden on the frog-pond designer to make certain the water will be safe for tadpoles and attractive to the

Channeling Insights

WaterShapes has been privileged to publish countless beautiful photographs through the years, and many of the best of them ended up on the printed magazine's cover.On a few occasions, however, great images weren't available for cover appearances. There were several possible reasons for this, but most often it had something to do with

Spa Strategies

For almost as long as I've been in business, people who are interested in swimming pools have also usually been interested in having a spa or hot tub to go along with it. It's always been a natural combination, and as watershapers we've found myriad ways to meet thegeneral demand. In the video linked below, I offer a quick discussion of two key factors homeowners need to consider in

An Eye on Aesthetics

The fact that frog ponds are so shallow offers the pond installer some special challenges with respect to making them look completely natural. As you'll see in the video linked below, there's an obvious temptation to take the easy way out by lining the edge with rocks of similarly large sizes and settling for the dreaded "string of pearls" look, where stones hang out like some sort of lumpy

Kinetic Wonder

Way back in my Pool Spa News editor days - I want to say circa 1990, but I may be off by a year or two - we ran a piece on a waterfeature built by Mike Stachel of Mt. Lake Pool & Patio (Doylestown. Pa.) to meet the needs of the Philadelphia Zoo's relentlessly cute capybaras. I've forgotten all of the details of the article (which, as a small twist of fate would have it, was written by future WaterShapes editor Eric Herman) other than the relentless cuteness of the creatures for whom the watershape was built, but enough of the memory of the project lingered that I made a point of stopping by the zoo while visiting the city ten or twelve years later to see how the critters were getting on. I also wanted to see whether they were as darned cute in person as they had been in Mike's photographs. I wasn't prepared in any way for the fact that they were actually too large to be considered cute. They were taller and longer and more girthsome than the photos I'd seen had led me to believe. I couldn't help thinking of them as supersized squirrels with bigger, sharper teeth and voracious appetites to match. The horror . . . Fortunately, there was much else to see at the zoo. Before I was anywhere near the capybara enclosure, in fact, I strolled up to and past the Impala Fountain and knew I'd come back for a longer look once I'd paid my respects to my rodent friends and Mike Stachel's handiwork. The Impala Fountain belongs to a class of waterfeatures for which I have something of a weakness - that is, fountains that feature wild animals interacting with water. I love the horses running up the steps at the entrance of Denver's Mile-High Stadium, for example, and I'm truly smitten by the mustangs that race across the stream in williams square irving, The difference in this case is that the impalas (executed between 1950 and 1963 by Philadelphia sculptor Henry Mitchell, are distinctly abstract - basically skeletonized versions of a dozen of these great and amazing leapers set in an arc above fountain jets, doubtless in flight from one sort of predator or another. To me, this is an ideal combination of sculpture and water where the kinetic nature of the fountain jets lends a direct sense of movement to the static sculptural elements. It's simply drop-dead gorgeous - and well worth a visit the next time you visit the Philadelphia Zoo to see Mike Stachel's fearsome capybaras.