ARTICLES Archives - Page 169 of 312

Making Safe Steps and Landings

Steps and landings are among the most common of all elements in landscapes. Just about any setting involving a vertical transition will include steps of some sort, and there’s no better design element than a landing to establish a means of changing

Ripples #19

Compiled and written by Lenny GiteckSwimming with Koi: Irish Politician’s Fishy Mishap Ripples has heard of swimming with dolphins, swimming with sharks (both human and fish) and swimming with stingrays (sadly, how TV host Steve Irwin lost his life in 2006), but we’ve never heard of

All in My Head

Last year was the worst I’ve endured since I was a novice in the pool and spa industry. At the time, I found myself taking comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone, that the recession was to blame for my ebbing sales and that we were all in the same boat. Misery, it seems, loved company. But I snapped out of it late last year. I now believe (as I should have last year) that when you constantly tell yourself things are bad, you almost ensure that they will be that way and stay that way. What I did to escape the trap was to

Some watershapers see their work in primarily technical terms – as complex tasks to be completed efficiently and well. Others, notes watershaper and landscape artist Christopher Lines, see technical mastery as a starting point beyond which they pursue purely artistic impulses. He’s firmly in the latter camp, he adds, with a penchant for creating classically-inspired gardens that tantalize the senses and fire the imagination with echoes of eras long past.

Persuaded by the Past

As I see it, watershaping is ultimately about its emotional effects: As designers and builders, it’s our job to bring a variety of technical and aesthetic elements together to create spaces and structures that leave our clients with enduring feelings of vitality, relaxation, comfort and luxury. In my case, the quest to realize this emotional component actually drives the process. As I strive to generate spaces that have real meaning for my clients, I’m always putting my heart into the work and am fully aware that what I do is an extension of who I am. Indeed, I’ve never been shy about letting my designs reflect my passion for art, architecture, history, color, form and even poetry. By working on this level, I find that I’m able to carry my clients along and make them as excited, inspired and engrossed by the process as I am. It’s an unabashedly romantic approach, but it can be infectious – and clearly satisfies everyone who gets involved. Of course, there is plenty of perspiration that goes along with the inspiration. For all of my enthusiasm, I spend a tremendous amount of time designing these spaces and selecting elements that will populate them, from the largest waterfeature to the smallest plant. I also closely manage the construction process, never relinquishing control because with each and every project, I’m expressing

Just about every watershaper knows that concrete is a marvelous material – strong, resilient, formable and capable of a long service life. But judging by common practice, says past concrete forensic examiner Jerry Werner, not all watershapers seem to be fully aware of the basic permeability of the material or recognize the fact that almost all structures made from concrete will benefit in the long run from the use of some form of waterproofing.

Concrete Inevitabilities

I’ve come to the world of watershaping from a different perspective. Back in the 1960s, I worked for a company that built poured-in-place concrete homes in Florida. Right from the beginning, I couldn’t help noticing the importance of waterproofing in the performance of these structures – or the consequences of not taking the potential for water intrusion seriously. My interest in this subject took on new significance in 1989, when I formed a Florida firm that conducted forensic analyses in all manner of structural failures as a service to

Having begun his career decades ago as a residential pool/spa service technician on Long Island, N.Y., watershaper Steve Kenny has a profound appreciation of superior water quality – one he developed, he says, despite a near vacuum when it came to high-caliber industry education on the subject. Today, this self-taught expert applies what he’s learned in building pools that combine unusual hydraulic designs with sophisticated water treatments.

Building Toward Clarity

When my family started in the pool and spa service business some 25 years ago, it didn’t take us long to recognize that there was very little available to us by way of education about water chemistry – or, for that matter, about most of the other skills involved in maintaining pools, spas and other waterfeatures. That didn’t make much sense to us, even then. After all, how could an industry devoted to the health, safety and comfort of millions of people function without addressing the need for standardized approaches to water maintenance or

Gardens for People

“Landscaping is not a complex and difficult art to be practiced only by high priests. In any age of reason, it is the owner who . . . decides . . . the garden and the purposes for which it will be used.” These words from landscape architect Thomas Church’s seminal book, Gardens Are for People, ring as true today as they did when they were first published in 1955. Gardens truly are for people, and while that’s manifestly an obvious statement, it seems to be a concept that insufficient numbers of today’s watershape and landscape designers fully grasp. That’s nothing new. More than half a century ago, in fact, Church was motivated to

Meeting Minds

Let’s begin this discussion with a question: What if you were so bad at your job that a person in a related field decided, for the good of his own business, he had to learn your business and replace you rather than cope with your incompetence? Most people would say that this would be a justified response to the fact that you do lousy work. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), this very thing is happening in the pool industry – or, more accurately, to the pool industry. For years now and with increasing frequency, landscape architects have decided they’ve had enough and are entering the pool industry. They are doing so because

Cross Connections

As I see it, watershaping is an activity in which multiple disciplines come together to design, engineer and construct decorative or recreational systems that contain and control water: pools and spas, fountains, ponds, streams and waterfalls, interactive water systems – “everything from birdbaths to lakes,” as publisher Jim McCloskey is relentlessly fond of saying. Those multiple disciplines encompass landscape architects and designers, pool designers and builders, architects, interior designers, environmental artists and a host of subtrades as well as adherents of various movements, from historic preservationists to professionals in the green industries. It’s a broad and exciting amalgam of interests, and my sense is that, as

Modern Landscapes for Living

By now, we all know that pools and certain other watershape forms have been around since ancient times. It’s my strong suspicion, however, that most of us who design and build backyard swimming pools today would fail a pop quiz about