ARTICLES Archives - Page 208 of 317

Located in an urban district near downtown Los Angeles, the Echo Park Deep Pool reopened recently after undergoing a $6-million renovation. Rowley International and Frank Webb Architects engineered and oversaw much of the swimming pool’s restoration while the city refurbished the surrounding facility. The result is a complex that’s been fully embraced by locals who now enjoy all the benefits of aquatic recreation and exercise.

Resounding Renewal

Echo Park is one of those places that has come to be defined by an all-too-familiar litany of urban woes: gangs, crime, violence, graffiti and drugs set amid aging buildings and a crumbling infrastructure. Fortunately, the community also has leadership that's working hard to change things for the better. One of the recent and most significant efforts to improve the lives of its citizenry involved renovating Echo Park Deep Pool, the area's only public swimming facility. The $6-million program involved enclosing the big pool with a new

Working in the arid beauty of the Sonoran Desert, watershaper and landscape artist Kirk Bianchi designed this set of watershapes and hardscape treatments to provide visual transitions between a custom home and its surroundings. He achieved this feat using crisp geometry, striking landscape details, a rich materials palette, sleek perimeter overflows and subtle water and fire features that deftly tie interiors to exteriors and the vastness of the desert beyond.

Desert Rhythms

One of the things I love about working in the southwest is the way the openness and rugged, sculptural appearance of the natural landscape opens the door to those who want to make bold architectural statements in concrete, stone, steel and glass. Even the plants here have an overtly sculpted quality. I appreciate this all the more by virtue of having worked in more tradition-bound places: Here in the southwest, I feel free to use a strong, contemporary design vocabulary in forging unique connections between built spaces and their dramatic surroundings. Although I'm perfectly comfortable working in those traditional styles, I'll admit to being heavily influenced by the masters of Modernism - particularly Frank Lloyd Wright and the German-born American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - and love the way those amazing mid-20th-century designers used clear, sculptural geometries to direct the eye and define intricate spatial relationships. The project depicted here is a direct channeling of their influence, aided and abetted by

Into the Ground

Given the fact that swimming pools and most other watershapes are placed in the ground, I've long been of the opinion that it's incumbent upon all of us who design and build them to have a basic understanding of soils science and geology. As has been stated in this magazine and elsewhere more times than I can count, the nature of the ground we build in (or on) has everything to do with the structures we design. Indeed, the composition and structure of the soils we encounter may well be the most fundamental of all the technical issue we ever face. Simply put, a watershape that's properly engineered in light of prevailing soil conditions will endure, while one that isn't runs a significant and often inevitable risk of structural failure. Relatively few of us who read WaterShapes are civil engineers, soils scientists or geologists, but all of us

Making Headway

What happens when you take a large group of landscape architecture students and, for a solid week, rigorously school them in the fundamentals of watershaping? You might be surprised: Even though that seems like a short span, my charges took to watershaping like fish to water when I introduced them to the subject this past spring - and the results were both remarkable and inspiring. As their instructor, I witnessed not only their keen interest but also saw ample evidence that they were applying highly refined design processes and quality design productions in their watershape-related coursework. So despite what some skeptics have been telling me for years, you actually can

Off the Shelf

I recently began work on a design for clients who live in a historic home just south of Rochester, N.Y. They've asked me to incorporate a pool, entertainment areas, a fireplace and a combined pool house/garage into the available space and make certain it all complements the architecture of the home and its only current outbuilding - a 150-year-old storage shed. Sitting at my drafting table, I was thinking how easy this one would be, conceptually at least. All I needed was there, from the home's architecture and an existing (and much beloved) 100-year-old pergola to the old shed, so the main challenge would come in drawing the details rather than in deciding what to do. Usually, of course, it's the other way around and

Planting Places

Growing as a designer is often a matter of seeing things from fresh perspectives. As one with roots in the pool industry, for example, I once thought first about water and about plants and softscape later (if at all). That bias isn't uncommon, of course: I know plenty of landscape architects and designers who think about plants first and only later consider water. It all has to do with our

Digging the Scene

You never know where and when a good time will unfold. That thought certainly crossed my mind late in July, when I attended "The World's Most Extreme Pond Build" at Aquascape's headquarters in St. Charles, Ill. That company, which manufactures a variety of pond, stream and waterfall systems and accessories, has been remarkably successful through the past decade: In that span, it's built a

Beyond the Edge

Last month, I did my usual annual roundup of books that feature custom residential swimming pools. I must confess that I deliberately withheld one such book from the usual summary treatment because it was just too good for me not to give it a full column's attention this time around. The book - Infinity Pools by Ana G. Canizares (Collins Design, 2006) - is one of the best on pools as a design genre that I've ever seen. In fact, one of the few things I don't like about it is the title, because I've always preferred the term "vanishing edge." That quibble aside, I think she's done a terrific job of presenting what has to be the most powerful, influential design look of the past 20 years. More important, she manages to do so without making these pools seem a visual cliché. As is demonstrated repeatedly

Illuminating Footsteps

It's not an uncommon goal: Nearly all of the homeowners I speak with about lighting designs want to be able to move safely and comfortably around their properties at night. Perhaps more important, they want guests and others unfamiliar with those spaces to be able to do the same without anyone being concerned about suffering an injury as a result of a misstep brought on by darkness or glare. The interesting this is, some of my clients need convincing when it comes to path or step lighting: Even if they see

Tumbling Down

Reading WaterShapes' 100th issue brought back memories of when I first discovered the magazine and my early conversations with its editor, Eric Herman. I remember thinking at that time - or at least hoping - that there really were lots of other people out there in the design/build world who truly aim to do things right, first time, every time. In looking over the poster included with the issue, I spotted the one from January 2000 with a photograph I'd taken of one of our projects - a retaining wall under construction. I don't know quite why, but that image made me think of a site I visited last year where a retaining wall built by inexperienced hands was in the process of collapsing. And not only was the wall falling apart, but it was also compromising the fence atop it as well as a concrete patio, a storage shed and an inground pool it was intended to bolster. I couldn't help thinking that, as far as our industry has come in the past decade, there are always going to be those who