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Ripples #74

Compiled and written by Lenny Giteck Are We in a New Golden Age Of Aquatic Entertainment?

More than two years in the making, this supersized backyard watershape pushed designer/builder Kathy Marosz to the limits of her design skills, construction expertise and mental and physical stamina. Here, in her third and final article on this extraordinary project, she reflects on what it took to make it all happen and guides us through a pictorial celebration of the project’s numerous (and generally exquisite) finishing details.

It’s not often that a watershaper tackles a job that takes more than two years of complete, full-time effort, but that’s been the case for the project pictured here. For nearly two and a half years, in fact, I devoted virtually all of my working life to this single backyard watershape environment, and as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there were times when I wondered if I was crazy to get involved with a project of this scope. Indeed, to describe it simply as a “backyard watershape environment” is to fall miles short of conveying the complexity of the systems covered in two previous WaterShapes articles (“When Dreams Grow,” April 2008, click here; and “Layering the Experience,” July 2008, click here): It was a monster project, and there were times I thought the beast had me at a distinct disadvantage. You know all about that, of course, if you’ve followed this sequence of articles, so I won’t belabor the point. Here, we’ll wrap things up by letting the photographs tell most of the story – although I must say the images don’t quite

Test Your Knowledge #63

Woman Breastfeeding in U.K. Public Pool Ordered to Stop

Preparing the Filter

The video linked below covers one of the many phases of a pond-installation project that can seem less critical than it really is. As I mention there, homeowners in particular tend to look at plumbing of the filter as pretty much the equivalent of working on the sprinklers – and they’re not far off, practically speaking. But the difference

Pivot Points

This has been a summer I won’t soon forget, personally or professionally. On the former side, it started wondrously with the birth of my first grandchild, which came shortly before I helped my oldest daughter, her husband and the new baby move houses (an adventure that sent me to the hospital with a severely strained back). It continued with my youngest daughter’s completion of her undergraduate studies, her grand tour of Europe and her start in medical

Sanitizing System ABCs

Of all the decisions related to swimming pool projects, the one that tends to be the most difficult for average consumers to wrap their minds around has to do with selecting the sanitizing system. And that’s with good reason, because water treatment is a complex, science-laden topic that can involve a lifetime of study. As a result, I figured that a simple, direct approach would be best in

Running Wild

I confess to having a weakness for this sort of fountain: There’s probably something about the mixture of water and “animated” sculpture that grabs my imagination in a way that isn’t true of many large-scale water displays. It this case, it may also have something to do with serendipity and the fact that, the first time I saw this composition, I came upon it entirely by chance. It was about ten years ago, while I was in Irving, Texas, for a series of meetings and had part of a day to myself to walk around and take in the nearby sights. It was early in the morning when a view of Williams Square opened up and I saw the Mustangs of Las Colinas, a string of larger-than-life bronzes by Robert Glen that seem to run through a narrow watercourse. (That “stream” and the surrounding plaza were devised by SWA Group, a landscape architecture firm with offices in California, Texas and overseas.) The composition was eight years in the making by the time it was unveiled in 1984, and I remember well the high (and much-deserved) level of attention and praise it gathered in the architectural press at the time. This is exactly the sort of chance encounter that made me happiest about being a steady traveler for so many years. If you find yourself in the Dallas area and have any opportunity to see this work of watershaping art in person, I strongly recommend the effort! To see a brief video of the Mustangs at Las Colinas, click here.

Sound and Motion

Making the transition from printed magazine to digital newsletter has been interesting, to say the least. I never thought I’d even think something like this, but there are so many advantages to the “new media” approach that I wouldn’t even consider doubling back to ink and paper at this point. One limitation that always bothered me in print, for example, was the fact that my art director and I had to select from among so many nice, wonderful, big photographs and crunch them down into tiny spaces. To be sure, we balanced the small ones with lots of large ones, but I can’t think of too many features in which I didn’t wish for extra

Pond Beginnings

Several months ago, a big idea crossed my mind and wouldn’t go away. For years now, I’ve been making videos about what I do as a pond designer and installer, and several of these recordings have appeared through WaterShapes EXTRA and WaterShapes.com in the past year or so. What if (I thought to myself), instead of covering things randomly, I switched over to a systematic approach and took the whole

How Big Is That Pool?

Almost anyone who’s spent much time around swimming pools is familiar with the classic method for measuring their water volume – that is, by multiplying length by width by average depth and then multiplying that result by 7.5, which is approximately the number of gallons in a cubic foot. That’s all well and good for basic rectangular watershapes, but what do you do when the pool in question has a truly irregular shape? The answer, as we’ll discuss here, has to do with