ARTICLES Archives - Page 242 of 316

Vertical Orientation

When I first entered the watershaping industry in the late 1970s, one of the details to which I took an immediate dislike was the practice of wrapping the tile that covered the walls of raised bond beams around the corner and onto step risers and various other vertical hardscape surfaces found around pools and spas. We've all seen it - Spanish Colonial Revivalist tiles of questionable authenticity, extra-bold in color and used to cover highly visible vertical surfaces. To me, these swaths invariably look out of place and have the effect of drawing attention to features that often don't warrant or benefit from the emphasis. It happens to this day because

Working in Color

When I paint, I constantly play with color on canvas and experiment with various combinations to see what works well and discover what, to my eye, clashes or doesn't seem to mix harmoniously. As a landscape designer, I'm aware of working through the same sort of process when I discuss color with clients - determining their likes and dislikes and narrowing the color palette down to those hues, values and intensities that are most appealing to them. Some aren't even aware until I launch into a discussion with them that they have particular tastes involving the color wheel. In my experience, all these clients lean

A Season for Renewal

For years now, I've listened to people gripe about trade shows - how dull they are and why attending them is such a colossal waste of time. It's gotten to a point where it's almost fashionable to take these shots, and I hear them not just about the pool shows with which I'm vastly familiar, but also about the landscape shows of which I've attended just a few. Actually, I've been attending trade shows for longer than I care to remember. Although just about every one of them managed to include some useful or positive experience, there's no question that I've approached them with diminishing enthusiasm through the years. I've never given up on them entirely, but I know a great many people who

October Skies

October has always been my favorite month. I was born in October and married not once but twice within the span of its 31 days. My son's birthday is October 11, and where I live in southern California, the weather is as beautiful as it gets straight through: The first hints of winter's chill chase

Completing the fountain for Disney’s California Adventure theme park presented watershaper Dave Wooten and his company with immense technical and operational challenges: In crafting a huge artificial ocean wave that serves as the park’s symbolic core, he and his staff not only pushed the limits of hydraulic and mechanical design, but also met incredible standards for planning, performance and system serviceability set by an awesome client.

Riding a Golden Wave

Sometimes you just know that a client is going to want something special - something nobody else has. I can think of no other entity that better fills that bill than the Walt Disney Co. Justly famed for its remarkable creativity, spirit of innovation and ultra-high standards for design and execution, I knew going in that working with this amazing organization would mean coming to the table with strong ideas, supreme self-confidence and a demonstrated willingness to test boundaries and perform beyond expectations. Our firm, Captured Sea of Sunset Beach, Calif., was founded with those exact qualities in mind and a mission to create fountain systems throughout southern California that are distinctive, unique in concept, superbly engineered and built to last. Through the past eight years, we've been fortunate to tackle several projects for Disney in southern California. In each case, they were looking for watershapes that would delight visitors while enduring the rigors of heavy-duty use and near-constant operation. The call about the fountain featured in this article came in late summer 1999 from Glendale, Calif.-based Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), the remarkable division of the company responsible for designing its theme parks and attractions. They told us that they were

Riding a Golden Wave

Sometimes you just know that a client is going to want something special - something nobody else has. I can think of no other entity that better fills that bill than the Walt Disney Co. Justly famed for its remarkable creativity, spirit of innovation and ultra-high standards for design and execution, I knew going in that working with this amazing organization would mean coming to the table with strong ideas, supreme self-confidence and a demonstrated willingness to test boundaries and perform beyond expectations. Our firm, Captured Sea of Sunset Beach, Calif., was founded with those exact qualities in mind and a mission to create fountain systems throughout southern California that are distinctive, unique in concept, superbly engineered and built to last. Through the past eight years, we've been fortunate to tackle several projects for Disney in southern California. In each case, they were looking for watershapes that would delight visitors while enduring the rigors of heavy-duty use and near-constant operation. The call about the fountain featured in this article came in late summer 1999 from Glendale, Calif.-based Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), the remarkable division of the company responsible for designing its theme parks and attractions. They told us that they were

Any backyard project that encompasses tons of stone, hundreds of square feet of glass tile, a complex waterfall structure, a large bridge, an island spa and other features focused on fun, elegance and beauty is likely to be something special. In this case, it happens to be one of master watershaper David Tisherman’s most intricate achievements to date – one he guides us through in this pictorial, which captures the challenges as well as the glorious results of an enormous collaboration.

One for the Future

As milestones go, the project depicted in these pages has been a big one for me - and for lots of other people as well. The grand estate with its outsized home is located in the countryside near Hanover, Pa., a remote setting that offered a set of challenges that has in many ways redefined what is and isn't possible in a whole region when it comes to watershape design, engineering and construction. A full two-and-a-half years in the making (a period broken up, of course, by stretches in which there was no activity on site), this stands as one of

For more than 25 years, sculptor Dale J. Evers has created sculptures that feature a broad spectrum of marine and aquatic life. In recent years, however, the focus of his work has moved from the refined atmosphere of art galleries into the world of watershape and landscape design – a shift, he says, that has energized his work and led him to a mode of design that lets him draw his cues not only from nature, but also from clients and settings.

Alive by Design

The most famous artists and designers often become known for one particular style or motif. When we see the cubism of Pablo Picasso or the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack, for example, we firmly link those distinctive artistic "moves" with the artists themselves. In some cases, those associations are extremely positive and add to the artist's or designer's mystique and prestige - certainly the case with Picasso and Pollack. For other artists who are less famous, however, an identifiable mode of expression can lead to confinement, predictability and, in some cases, a needless limitation of vision and creative possibilities. Since I began my career in the early 1980s, I've focused on capturing aquatic life forms in mixed-media sculptures to such an extent that my name is associated with the genre - although I'm certainly no Picasso. Indeed, in the years I've been active, there have been so many sculptures, statues and paintings depicting whales, dolphins and fish that the genre I love has become something of a cliché. So many consumers love such images that a vast number of enterprising artists have stepped in to meet the demand. The problem is that so many of these efforts are uninspired and

Familiarity with historic architectural and garden styles presents landscape professionals with many opportunities to serve both clients and our collective design heritage, says landscape architect and scholar Greg Pierceall. A cluster of homes in Attica, Ind., offers a case in point – a situation in which knowledge of the ins and outs of the Greek Revival style was the key to reviving an entire neighborhood.

New Revivals

As landscape professionals, most of us seek not only to innovate and drive the industry to new levels, but also endeavor as necessary to learn about basic design principles and styles that have inspired and ignited design movements in past centuries. By studying the range of architectural and landscape styles that have gone before us, we learn to use historical cues to guide us in our current tasks. At the same time, our knowledge of what was done in the past positions us to develop variations on themes and do things

Water conservation is something every one of us needs to take seriously, observes irrigation-system expert James Minnich. For landshapers, he says, this means understanding and using technologies that make conservation easier – and making certain clients know that they, too, have a role to play by enabling professionals to install efficient, environmentally sound systems.

Water Wise

Conserving water in a serious way is something many of us have had to do at one time or another. Whether it has resulted from drought or some other condition affecting local supplies, we know that any sort of shortage has significant implications not just for us, but for our communities, clients and landscapes as well. In those landscapes, water conservation is about finding ways to reduce water use and coming up with more efficient ways to use it. This is essential to ensuring the survival of plants (and our livelihoods) and has to do with giving gardens the amount of water they need to thrive: Too little, and plants will shrivel up and die; too much, and many will drown just as surely. For the most part, what landshapers encounter is the need to cope with shortfalls and pronounced dry spells rather than floods, which is why most professionals install irrigation systems that make it easier for