ARTICLES Archives - Page 154 of 312

Building Walls, Stone by Stone

It usually catches people off guard when I say so, but when it comes to building dry-stacked stone walls, the installer’s awareness of local climate and soil conditions is paramount to a project’s success. It’s about more than materials, in other words, or more than

Test Your Knowledge #30

What Sport Does Michael PhelpsPlan to Tackle After He Retires?

Ripples #41

Compiled and Written by Lenny Giteck James Cameron Makes Solo Dive To Bottom of Mariana Trench

Rearranging the Furniture II

My recent blog on the formation of Artistic Resources & Training brought an unusual response: Not a single person wanted to comment on my words in print, and the many who called me directly all requested that our conversation be off the record. While that hasn’t advanced the dialogue I was hoping to build, it amply demonstrates that feelings are running high – which is, I suppose, understandable given the

Stone Practicalities

In typical construction projects, we use stone for lots of purposes – as pavers, veneers or naturalistic landscape outcroppings, for instance. We also use plenty of stone in crafting the surfaces and banks and the areas surrounding our watershapes. But far and away the most common use for this material is in the building of

Planning on Concealment

Once you start thinking along the lines of putting visual clutter out of sight, it’s as though a whole range of interesting concealment possibilities begin presenting themselves. Case in point: My early work in stashing hoses in buried utility boxes triggered thoughts about hiding other bits of deck “plumbing” that do a remarkable job of

Unconventional Plaster?

When I started my career more than 20 years ago, habit and standards dictated that swimming pool plaster should be white. By that time, happily, a handful of suppliers had begun offering colored aggregates, and then products including PebbleTec began expanding the palette to a point where about a dozen colors were available, give or take a few. These were shades of blue, mostly, ranging through to grays and darker grays. Then, about ten years ago,

Test Your Knowledge #29

Swimmer Ian Thorpe Fails toQualify for London Olympics

Historic Reflections

I’ve spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., through the years. I was born there in the 1950s, my favorite aunt lived there in the ’60s, one of my brothers lived there through part of the ’70s, business took me to the area frequently in the ’80s and ’90s, and one of my sisters