ARTICLES Archives - Page 303 of 314

Water Lilies on Parade

So you read my last article and were so excited about Amazonian Water Lilies that you'd decided to talk some clients into going for it. But alas, after measuring their yard, you recognize that you won't have enough room to accommodate the gargantuan watershape you'll need to host such an immense plant. But your clients are still hot to trot with something unusual, even after you've accepted the fact that

Hemispheres of Interest

I've racked up my fair share of professional accolades and honors in the past 20-odd years. I suppose if I paid too much attention to all that stuff, I might be tempted to think that I know almost everything about my industry - but I wouldn't dream of harboring that thought, because the amount of stuff I don't know has always impressed me a lot more than the pile of stuff I do know. That simple recognition has made me hungry for knowledge and new experiences and has influenced the way I've always approached my life and my work. In fact, I shudder to think of all the things

Across the Waters

For all the comments I've heard through the years that there are too many swimming pool trade shows and that the National Spa & Pool Institute's big national show isn't

The technology known as the Global Positioning System (GPS) originally was assembled to guide missiles in military operations, but watershaper Paolo Benedetti sees civilian use of this satellite-based navigation system as one of the next technological frontiers for high-end designers and contractors. Here, he tells how he’s already put it to use – and how it helped him stave off an earth-bound disaster that was just waiting to occur.

An Aerial Assist

This is a story about a job that didn't happen - not yet, at any rate. It all started when I was brought in to bid on a hillside swimming pool project and ended months later, with the dust still settling and the project scuttled for the moment. And nobody could have been happier with that outcome than I was. That fact that my client and I decided to pull back and wait is not so unusual, but given the fact that the decision was driven by advanced military navigation technology makes this one of the most unusual situations I've ever encountered. The upshot

Water doesn’t typically fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Indeed, multitudes of environmental factors influence it along the way, making its behavior unpredictable and offering real challenges to engineers who want to create consistent visual and aesthetic effects. But when it comes to extending laminar flows, says fountain designer Paul L’Heureux, things that couldn’t be accomplished a few years back are now within reach – even in backyards.

Stretching Water

Through all the centuries of watershape design, the laws of physics have imposed restrictions on the watershaper's ability to extend a laminar flow of sheeting water beyond a drop of five or six feet. Go much beyond that limit and the sheet breaks up, thus impairing the aesthetic effect, causing an annoying degree of splashing and generating an abundance of undesirable, monotonous noise. Those physical laws have been seriously bent in public spaces in recent times. Indeed, special weirs and nozzles have made it possible to achieve laminar flows of 12 feet or more. Up until now, the solutions employed to achieve these effects have usually been beyond the budget of smaller commercial projects or residential clients - but that's changing. At my firm, Crystal Fountains, we've long been studying the phenomenon of falling water with an eye toward maximizing the surface tension of water and thereby extending the "laminar" effect without breaking the bank. We've had the luxury of working on some high-end projects that enabled us to perform the research and development necessary to do that stretching. By adapting some of the design ideas we

To see what happens when a watershape is completely, entirely, organically linked to architecture, you need look no farther than the work of John Lautner and many of the projects he completed before his death in 1994. Mentored by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner saw swimming pools and other waterfeatures as integral components in compositions of great and enduring beauty, says Helena Arahuete, who was in turn mentored by Lautner and is now the principle architect in the firm that bears his name. (Photo by Alan Weintraub/Arcaid)

Organic Artistry

Helena Arahuete joined the staff of John Lautner's architectural firm in the early 1960s, at a point where he was turning out some of his most spectacular work. Indeed, Lautner can indisputably be said to have designed some of the most beautiful and unusual homes built in the second half of the 20th Century. An apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright's who studied with the master at Taliesen, Lautner was an exponent of the philosophy and discipline known as "Organic Architecture," an approach Arahuete, now an eminent architect in her own right, has continued to use and refine while running the firm that still bears Lautner's name. She is now one of the world's leading practitioners of Wright's and Lautner's approach to creating unique structures that are intricately and intimately tied to their surroundings. She is also so firm a proponent of the integration of watershapes into those architectural forms that in April 2000, she carried her message to the first Genesis 3 Level II Design School, held in Islamorada, Fla. - and welcomed an opportunity to present some of Lautner's work here by way of defining the place watershapers have at the design table with

There’s no rule that says installing realistic faux rocks has to be difficult. In fact, states Rock & Water Creations’ Rodger Embury, if you let nature do the detail work, making faux rocks believable is within reach of almost any contractor who knows his or her way around rebar and gunite. In this pictorial, he demonstrates the process by using pre-cast rock panels to create rock faces and cantilevers in and around watershapes.

Instant Geology

Some may disagree with me, but I don't see faux rockwork as a "sculptor's art form." For more than 25 years, I've made sure that Mother Nature is the one who does the detail work; what I do is take copies of her artwork to job sites and install them in creative and interesting ways. A long time ago, I developed a method of making castings of real rocks using my own formulation of fiberglass and epoxy. These are exact replicas of the real thing: Once mounted on steel structures in swimming pools or other hardscape applications, the panels are

The true artistry of stream building is found in the closing phase of construction, says landscape designer Rick Anderson. Here, in the final installment of his series on streamcrafting, he walks us through the concluding steps he takes to transform a raw installation into a finished watershape that dazzles the eye with its natural look and delights the ear with its gentle sound.

A Stream Comes to Life

Now comes the fun part. The final stage of building a stream is where all of the planning and close attention to the stream's earthen substructure, transitions in elevation, liner alignment and hydraulics come into play as you move to build in details that effectively mimic nature. In the first two installments of this series (click here for part 1, here for part 2), I discussed in detail how you excavate and grade the site, place the major transition stones, lay in the liner and install

As watershaping moves toward new creative frontiers, the trade is approaching a point where it’s tough to set a boundary between craft and art. One who clearly has crossed the line into fine art is modernist sculptor Barton Rubenstein, who uses water to create a range of intriguing aesthetic experiences. They might not look like other watershapes, but he insists that the physical and aesthetic principles he applies are all quite familiar.

Fluid Expressions

It's an age-old paradox, this relationship between art and science. On the face of it, things artistic may seem solely the realm of high-flying thinkers and philosophers who spend their days at the far reaches of interpretation and meaning. By contrast, engineers and scientists would seem to be dealing purely in the certainties of what is quantifiable and real. The truth is, I don't know of a modern art form that doesn't involve technology of some kind. Conversely, most branches of modern science call upon researchers to apply a great deal of intuition and creativity to the processes of exploration and discovery. In other words, neither the arts nor the sciences could exist without ideas and disciplines derived from the other. That's especially true when it comes to water systems. Whether created for aesthetic or recreational purposes, art and science can come together here in a particularly compelling and interesting way. By combining technical disciplines with

The thing that makes a painting great isn’t the pigment mixed on the palette or the brush used to apply it. Those are merely tools, observes landscaper Jim Lampl, who finds art and beauty in the way the strokes are laid on the canvas. The same holds true for watershapes, he says: The art and beauty aren’t in the stones or plantings, but in the way all of the components and materials are composed on site.

Natural Intuitions

I believe that what we strive for in our watershapes is evident in the paintings and sculpture of the great masters. The harmony, the beauty, the drama, the excitement of the senses, the total captivation of the viewer create an experience we call great art. The more we can reflect on this work and use it as a lofty benchmark, the more effective our watershapes become. I've always believed that the best way to work at the highest level is to follow the tenets of