ARTICLES Archives - Page 191 of 315

Illuminating Outdoor Rooms

For more than 10 years now, outdoor rooms have been growing steadily in both popularity and complexity. That’s great, because it enables designers – architects, landscape architects, landscape designers and pool builders alike – to bring interiors outside and provide living spaces where activities previously associated strictly with indoor spaces can move comfortably into the great outdoors. It’s a fantastic way to expand living areas and create useful spaces while also adding entirely new types of experiences to the lives of homeowners. Among this trend’s many implications is that it has challenged landscape lighting designers to think in all-new ways about how we light exterior spaces. For starters, we need to be aware that most homeowners will enjoy these spaces exclusively after dark – and also be conscious of the fact that these environments require much more complicated lighting schemes than classic suburban patios ever did. The differences are so profound that I believe lighting designers need to talk to clients in new ways that

Medical Arts

Not long ago, I did a pair of columns on healing gardens and their benefits. If you’ll recall, I preached the importance of persuading hospitals in particular to include these spaces in their overall site plans as a means of providing garden environments for patients, patients’ families and hospital staff: These spaces reduce stress, help patients heal more quickly and give everyone who visits them a soothing sense of tranquility. I’ve attempted to the greatest extent possible to practice what I preached, and through the years I’ve installed numerous health-specific gardens at local assisted-living centers, Alzheimer’s care facilities and even at a center for emotionally-challenged children. But truth be told, I haven’t met with much success with our local hospitals, despite the fact that healing gardens have caught on with countless such facilities coast to coast. I don’t know quite why this is, but we

Pools of Light

If there’s ever been such a thing as a match made in heaven, swimming pools and landscape lighting lay a strong claim to that perfection. Separately, they take little-used spaces and transform them to all-day hubs of activity and sources of constant beauty. Together, however, the magic starts, with pools and landscape lighting systems accentuating each other’s virtues in ways that are tough to quantify or adequately describe. To landscape lighting designers and installers, pools offer a

Digging for Insight

For the best part of 20 years now, trend watchers have tracked Baby Boomers and have kept telling us that, as we aged, we’d definitely become homebodies – so much so that the words “nesting,” “cocooning” and “staycation” have all taken significant places in our social vocabulary. It’s a concept I’ve touched upon in these pages – numerous times, in fact – while observing that watershapes and other aquatic amenities go hand in glove with

Pursuit of Perfection

Through the years – but particularly within the past two or three – one of the comments I’ve heard with the greatest frequency is that WaterShapes is improving dramatically with respect to the content it presents. I’m always happy to hear any kind of positive feedback, but I’m always curious to know what about our coverage seems to be improving the most and always ask those who are making these comments to be as specific as they can. “Frankly,” I tell them, “I’m so close to what we print in the magazine that I

A Place to Begin

It’s a bit hard for me to believe it, but it’s now been fully 11 years since I attended my first Genesis 3 design school. One of the events I remember most clearly from that first session was (among many others) David Tisherman laying out a bunch of books and recommending that we should immediately obtain and read all of them. Always looking for a firm foothold, I asked him which one I should read first, and, without hesitation, he pointed to Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition. I didn’t act on his advice right away, but I eventually acquired a copy and started reading – and it took me nearly

Civic Celebrations

For years, Montréal’s arts district has been the venue for music and theater performances, art exhibitions, festivals and all manner of cultural events. As part of a revitalization process in the area, notes David L’Heureux, the city recently unveiled the Place des Festivals and a spectacular watershape he and a distinguished design team built at its heart as a gathering place for residents and visitors of all ages and a civic focus for fun, relaxation and visual joy. Throughout North America in recent years, cities have turned to a variety of watershapes to enliven and, occasionally, revitalize their public spaces. These watershapes are more than the wonderful fountains long found in public parks and plazas. Indeed, the recent success of projects including Chicago’s Millennium Park and its ambitious combination of significant waterfeatures with gardens, architecture and art has demonstrated the tremendous potential that lies in crafting interesting, multi-functional places for people to gather. Canada offers a spectacular recent example of this trend in the form of

Wiring Simplified

Although the details of a well-organized equipment pad are seldom the object of as much appreciation as are the purely aesthetic touches on a project, they are no less important to its success, says Paolo Benedetti. Here, in the latest installment of his series on design and engineering solutions to common construction challenges, he offers advice on a key part of pad organization – that is, the management of its wiring connections. With today’s watershape circulation and support equipment becoming ever more complicated, there’s an increasing need to make equipment pads as uncluttered as possible. With that in mind, I’ve developed a few simple wiring strategies that let me keep things neat, organized and serviceable. It requires some improvisation, unfortunately, because for all the efforts manufacturers have undertaken to improve product performance, in many cases they have failed to make the wiring task as easy as it should be. A classic example is found in

When second-generation metalworker and sculptor Kris Kesler wanted to take his custom waterfeatures to a higher, more artistic level, he took off his welding mask and picked up a computer mouse. It’s been liberating, he says, enabling him to design everything from simple scuppers to hurricane-proof fountains and take care of the details that make them work on screen before he puts his hands in gloves and goes at it with hammer and tongs.

Where Art Meets Technology

{Multithumb} When second-generation metalworker and sculptor Kris Kesler wanted to take his custom waterfeatures to a higher, more artistic level, he took off his welding mask and picked up a computer mouse. It’s been liberating, he says, enabling him to design everything from simple scuppers to hurricane-proof fountains and take care of the details that make them work on screen before he puts his hands in gloves and goes at it with hammer and tongs. Growing up in a family of industrial and commercial fabricators, I was steeped from an early age in traditional metalworking techniques – hammering, planishing, leather-sandbag shaping and my favorite, torch welding. Learning at my father’s knee in his commercial steelwork factory led me to admire the artistry of craftspeople as they transformed raw hunks of metal into functional and often beautiful works of art. The power of that experience has always stuck with me. Later in life, when I decided to launch my own water- and fire-feature company, I was excited to get back behind the welding mask and

Although heating water by using energy found beneath the earth’s surface is far from a new idea, watershape designer/builder Douglas Cook reports that only recently has this geothermal bounty become available for use with pools and spas. Here, he offers a primer on this emerging technology, discussing ways in which the benefits of a fully renewable energy supply are starting to turn clients’ heads – and transform the way watershapes are heated or cooled.

Subterranean Energy

Places just below the earth’s surface have been a resource for heating and cooling basically since the planet took shape. Ever since, all sorts of creatures have taken refuge from excessive heat or extreme cold by burrowing into the soil, and it’s no accident that some of the earliest examples of human self-expression have been found in caves deep below the surface. With pools and spas, however, up until recently there’s always been a legitimate question about whether this timeless heating/cooling approach was workable on any sort of cost-effective basis. If recent projects designed by my firm, Aloha Pools Design Studio (Franklin, Tenn.) are any indication, that question has now been answered with a resounding yes. On the face of it, that answer seems obvious. After all, the U.S. Department of Energy says that geothermal heating is more cost effective than a 95-percent efficient gas heater – and that the same would be true even if 100-percent efficient gas heaters were available. Only recently, however, have the suppliers of these systems reached a point where their equipment is