ARTICLES Archives - Page 278 of 326

For more than three decades, artist and tile maker Michelle Griffoul has pushed at the boundaries of her chosen medium. Her wildly colorful and boldly expressive works bristle with a passion for nature and a love of whimsy, resulting in a body of work unique in the realms of interior, exterior and watershape design. In this feature, she defines her distinctive approach to a classic material and takes us on a pictorial tour of her colorful works of art.

Coloring with Clay

I've been playing with clay for a long time - ever since 1968, when I took my first ceramics class in high school. Clay has captured my imagination mainly with its flexibility: I can carve it, build with it and even color it. For years, I've sculpted pieces of tile out of stoneware and porcelain clay. The individual pieces are then combined to create mosaic compositions, which, among other things, means that I'm able to create works of art that can go just about anywhere and are especially at home in and around water. Now, more than 30 years into working with this wonderful medium as a potter, then as an art student in the United States and Italy and especially in

Good Chemistry

Water is a chemical compound with a variety of physical characteristics, including the ability to act as a solvent and to harbor life. For those two reasons alone, says chemistry expert Jeff Freeman, watershape designers and builders should want to know everything they can about water chemistry - but they typically don't. Here, he begins a new series on the importance of water chemistry with a discussion of why watershapers really do need to care.

Set in the glorious Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia, this project called on watershaper Mario Abaldo’s firm to strike an energetic balance between form, function, the needs of the site and input from the homeowners – with everything assembled atop a basic structure that had been ineptly started by another builder. Here, Abaldo shows us around the finished backyard and a variety of amenities that bring the words ‘something for everyone’ to mind.

The Complete Retreat

Finishing up a project of any size is all about the details. From the final touches on the artificial rockwork and the placing and adjusting of lights to the fine tuning of the circulation system and signing off on the equipment room, the art of fine watershaping ultimately boils down to applying the same stringent standards for excellence that you bring to the beginning and middle of the project straight through to the end. Of course, it's virtually impossible to complete a project of this magnitude without

Just the Ticket

There are those in this business who are extremely adept at selling, and I'm definitely not one of them. I get by, but it's never been my long suit by any means. I've always admired the good salespeople I've met, and I fully accept the hard reality that to build a watershape at any level, one must sell it first. But I came up on the design/construction side of the watershaping business, and I've never found a clear way past the fact that, for me, sales has always been an area where I consistently have plenty of room for personal growth and improvement. I know that selling is important not only because it brings business through the door, but also because it sets the stage for everything that follows as a project progresses. As practiced by real professionals, I've observed that it's much more about

A Visual Audition

Recently, I've been involved in the early stages of a project that has lent new meaning to the phrase, "seeing is believing." It came up as a result of a call from an agent for a well-heeled client who was interested in having me design and build a residential swimming pool in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. When I arrived in Texas, I was met by the owner's agent, David, and by Marcus Bowen, a landscape architect who was part of the large project team, which, I would learn, included architects, a landscape architect, an interior designer, a lighting designer, various engineers, numerous

Feeling Right at Home

My daughter and I just returned from our annual trip to visit family in Connecticut and used the occasion this time to travel all over the northeast - from Boothbay Harbor, Portland and Camden in Maine to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and other parts of Massachusetts as well as slices of New Hampshire and Rhode Island. I'm never disappointed by the beauty I find in that part of the country. The landscapes are much lusher than they are at home in southern California, a fact that drives home the point that I spend most of my time in a desert. The old-growth trees back east are

Precision Planning

I operate under the hopeful assumption that all professional watershapers know that detailed, quality construction plans are crucial to the success of any project. Too often, however, I get the unsettling feeling that some contractors in the watershaping trades see plan documents mainly as a means of securing a construction permit. Such a bare-minimum approach can lead to an endless array of problems that can be summed up simply: Plans lacking in detail leave way too many issues to chance and inevitably lead to mistakes. And because we all work in a field where things are quite literally

The Clarity Class

It only stands to reason that you can't have a watershape without the water, but I sometimes wonder just how much watershapers really know about

The Entrada Golf Course on the outskirts of St. George, Utah, stands at the heart of an unusual cluster of housing developments. For the past five years, watershaper Richard Allen has worked non-stop to integrate the entire, grand composition through its watershapes, from big lakes and watercourses to intimate streams that run along the property lines of many of the homes – all in the name of creating a much-desired oasis in an arid landscape.

Life in an Oasis

When people talk about how much they love living in the desert, I've come to believe that what they really mean is that they love living in an oasis looking out onto the desert. That's profoundly ironic, but my clients in St. George, Utah, have all chosen for one reason or another to move to an extraordinarily arid place and seem universally to crave the presence of water in their immediate surroundings. This is indeed one of the most important things they're looking for in homes in our developments. It's one of the reasons why

The Fairmount Water Works is a monument to the history of water treatment in the United States, says Ed Grusheski, manager of public affairs for the Philadelphia Water Department. Established in 1815, the facility pumped water from the Schuylkill River until 1909 and has recently been restored and transformed into an interpretive center to educate the public on pollution prevention, watershed management and the history of the Water Department. (Lithograph by Currier and Ives, ca. 1860. Courtesy Philadelphia Water Department)

Historic Treatments

Local historians claim that the image of Philadelphia's Fairmount Water Works was the most reproduced of any industrial site in the United States through the first half of the 19th Century - and for good reason. At that time, the facility represented the absolute state of the art and served as a major point of pride for local residents as well as a source of fascination to visitors from near and far. Throughout its long history, the facility was indeed at the leading edge of water-delivery technology and is now the ideal place to capture and tell the story of the development of environmentalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The story begins