ARTICLES Archives - Page 192 of 312

When It Rains

The numbers are eye-popping: Just about one percent of all the water on Planet Earth exists as freshwater suitable for human consumption. And depending on where you live in the United States, anywhere from a quarter to almost half of that precious resource is used for irrigation. This is why it’s so important for those of us who design watershapes and exterior environments to consider options that minimize our use of potable water to maintain the landscape – and why I’m glad I picked up a copy of Rain Gardens by Nigel Gunnett and Andy Clayden (Timber Press, 2007): This 190-page text defines specific steps we can all take to replace municipal or well water with rainwater, capturing a gift from the skies and using it to sustain our landscapes. As the authors point out, we live in a time when drought is

Tomorrow’s Advocates

Standing in front of classes filled with landscape architecture students is always an unpredictable proposition: You just never know what their young minds will bring to the education process, the only constant being that they’re always full of surprises. Each and every time I’ve had the privilege of starting a new semester with a fresh group of students, however, it’s never long before one of them will ask me about how ecologically sound watershapes really are or can be. Truth be told (and as you’ll see in what follows), this has become something of a sore subject for me. So when the question inevitably comes, I pause, ponder a bit and finally tell these eager young people that

Down to the Ground

Whether you’re a watershaper or a landscape architect, designer or artist, I’ve always felt that those of us who work on exterior environments should stand on the front lines of the “green movement.” After all, we move the soil, alter the terrain, plant trees and shrubs and define the use of water, among many other things. In the course of doing what we do, in other words, we alter (sometimes profoundly) the environments in which our clients live and work. It seems the media are taking notice. Every year, for example, our

Easier Being Green

Until quite recently, it was difficult to find too many people in the watershaping industry who were willing to say much about “going green.” For a while now, I’ve thought that was a mistake: It’s been manifestly clear for several years that practices and programs related to energy conservation, water conservation and an overall sense of environmental responsibility are here to stay, and I always think it’s better to stay ahead of the curve when these movements arise than it is to

Behind True Green

I wasn’t surprised when Jim McCloskey suggested that it was high time for us to produce a Green Issue of WaterShapes: I’ve known him for more than 20 years and have long admired his dedication to environmentalism, recycling and keeping the planet healthy for his children and everyone else’s children as well – beliefs I wholeheartedly share. I was, however, caught a bit off guard by

As is true of many of his fellow watershape and landscape artists, Rick Driemeyer is also an avid explorer of nature. For years, in fact, he’s made a practice of regularly visiting wilderness areas for both professional inspiration as well as pure enjoyment – a perfect pairing, as he sees it. To press that point here in a big way, he shares what he’s encountered in hiking through four of the most spectacular national parks in the western United States.

National Wonders

By now, the thought that watershape and landscape designers need to study nature if they want to replicate it in their projects is basically a cliché. Truly, if you want to mimic nature successfully, you must first know it intimately. What many miss in all this, I believe, is a deeper level of “knowing” that goes well beyond simply observing nature as a source of techniques and ideas. Frankly, I think that as designers and as human beings, we are much better off when we also learn how to become nature – by which I mean letting the sights, sounds and smells draw us physically into the place. In doing so, we engage in experiences so profound that the mere mentioning of that place will set us off with memories we will share enthusiastically – or can use as parts of our latest projects. No matter how often I visit natural places, I’m always amazed at the

It’s not his daily practice to install watershapes in conjunction with computer-controlled telescopes, but that’s just what Jim Wilder had to do in creating a reflecting pool to surround a towering pyramid atop which an observatory now sits. Through close collaboration with what can best be described as a ‘stellar’ project team, he and his colleagues developed a design solution that stands among the most unusual Wilder has ever seen for a residential project.

Eyes on the Skies

Among the wonderful benefits of working in the custom watershaping business is that you never really know what sort of projects will wander into view. Through the years, we at Live Water Creations of Santa Rosa, Calif., have certainly participated in developing and executing some unusual designs, but I can honestly say that working on one that included a huge, beautiful steel pyramid topped by a deep-space telescope was something that had yet to come our way. And it would have stayed that way had I not received a call from John Anderson of Pools by Rapp, another firm here in Santa Rosa. We’ve collaborated on other projects in which our firm has built ponds or fountains to go along with pools and spas he’s done. In this case, he was installing a lap pool and wanted our help in what he could only describe as an extremely unusual watershape. The client said he had just built a beautiful contemporary home and, as an astronomy buff, wanted to complete the package with

Materials scientist and concrete expert George Yoggy has studied the shotcrete and gunite processes for more than 50 years, focusing not only on tunnel and mine construction but also turning his eye toward watershapes. Here, he reviews industry standards for the density, strength and permeability of pneumatically placed concrete shells and urges watershapers to step up and adopt standards and practices followed by others in the concrete industry.

The Elevated Game

In the world of concrete science and application, innumerable variables have an influence on whether a concrete installation is successful or not. These include but are not limited to the skill of the applicator, the suitability of the mix design, the temperature at the time of application, the equipment used, the water-to-cement ratio and the size of the aggregate. For all the seeming complexity, however, the nature of the material itself invests the process with a few immovable facts. One of these directly undermines the swimming pool industry’s “standard” that calls for a compression strength of 2,500 pounds per square inch for pneumatically placed concrete (that is, gunite or shotcrete). It’s not because the standard is inadequate per se; rather, it’s because

Luxury with a Twist

Root Design has always focused on developing environments that delight, inspire and occasionally surprise clients, but the project seen in this, the first of two articles, may well be the company’s most elaborate to date. Here, Ben Dozier and Michael Percy describe what went into designing and building across the entire site, including the multiple watershapes that helped transform this estate into an oasis filled with plants, light, sounds and water. Although it doesn’t always work out this way, the best-case scenario for us at Root Design (Austin, Texas) is to accept full responsibility for all exterior spaces of a given property, from the footprint of the house out to the property lines. In these situations, our team is able to establish designs with wall-to-wall continuity in response to the environment, the architecture and our client’s wishes. We commit ourselves in these circumstances to taking homeowners and their guests on a journey, starting the moment they enter the property and moving all the way through to the yard’s farthest reaches and all the spaces in between. Along the way, they’ll enter a variety of small or large vignettes, conceal-and-reveal discoveries, dramatic focal points and multiple rewarding destinations – each conceptually linked as a coherent “whole.” In this case, we were called upon to

Seeking Inspiration

In looking back on my career, I see that the past 20 years have been marked by a number of points at which I altered what I was doing. Sometimes I changed companies; other times I found a way of shifting my approach to my work or how I conducted my life. In looking back, I’m proud of the fact that every time I chose to go in a new direction, the changes I made resulted in dramatic improvements in my career and in my enjoyment of my work and, indeed, of my life in general. In other words, I’ve learned that, when approached the right way, change offers us an opportunity to advance our own causes in business and in life. Yes, it can be scary in that it typically involves