ARTICLES Archives - Page 308 of 314

Starting to Click

It's really too bad that no one was around with a camera, taking pictures when the Egyptians built the great pyramids. Just imagine the volumes of

As clients demand more and more creativity and aesthetic value in their watershapes, an increasing number of professionals are turning to the installation of prefabricated or custom-designed mosaics as a way to add elegance, complexity and sometimes even humor to their work. Here, tile expert Dan Andrews surveys this trend and takes us on a tour through the possibilities of a form of artistic expression with a long, long history.

It's an art form that connects modern craftspeople to those of the distant past. In fact, the roots of mosaic tiling can be traced to Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., where temple walls were decorated with simple earthenware fragments. Centuries later, the ancient Greeks decorated their courtyards with large and small pebble mosaics, and sophisticated examples of mosaic work are found later in everything from Turkish mosques to Italian basilicas. The Romans, however, probably pushed mosaics about as far as any culture could in the first few centuries A.D. They adorned baths, pools, spas, floors and walls of important buildings as well as humbler residences with intricate mosaics made up of ceramic, stone, glass and marble. Recent years may have seen a revival of this ancient artistic technique, but as can be seen in the accompanying photographs, what many of today's designers are doing with classic forms is a real step forward - a departure from tradition that has made today's mosaics a thoroughly modern form of

When concrete shells crack, trouble is near at hand: The emerging cracks are sure to grow, and water will eventually leak out of the watershape to create a cascade of additional problems. Unfortunately for the homeowner, the options here are few and can be very costly. In this feature, an expert in crack remediation and shell repair explores those options and discusses the techniques he uses to shore up severe structural cracks in a reliable and permanent way.

Squeezing the Gaps

Despite everyone's best intentions, concrete structures sometimes crack. If those cracks occur in the shell of a pool, spa or other watershape and are big enough, they'll eventually leak - which often leads to development of even bigger cracks and far larger headaches for everyone involved. In many cases, nobody is to blame. You might have worked under the guidance of a geologist or engineer and used good construction practices in building a structure meant to withstand the tests of soils that expand, contract, shift, settle and occasionally quake, but structural cracks are a fact of life. You can

From expansive commercial installations to small backyard waterfeatures, artificial rockwork has become a mainstay for many watershapers – and for good reason: It allows the builder to achieve looks that might not have been possible otherwise, and to do so at reasonable cost. In this feature, experienced faux-rock designer and installer Ken Macaire covers some of the principles he applies in selecting formations and in creating rockworks that dazzle the eye while looking truly ‘natural.’

Creating Good Impressions

The most important use of faux rock is to make a geological statement - to provide an important accent or focal point in a landscape where none exists. My goal is to create rock formations that complement and enhance the natural setting and fit in harmoniously with their surroundings. That's a point builders who use artificial rock sometimes fail to grasp. They'll execute an ambitious scheme with lots of interesting, well-crafted rockwork, but it ultimately looks unnatural because the rocks they've created have no logical relationship to any indigenous formations or anything else in the surrounding space. I approach things in a different way - one that embraces the site and all of its features. I select, form and install faux rocks that, together, create interesting and beautiful statements in the overall landscape design. As I work, I make my installations to stand up to the question, "Is this rock formation

When do you think about the exterior lighting for your watershapes and their surroundings? Is it an afterthought, or part of your plan from the beginning? In his experience, says veteran lighting designer Mike Hersman, the former is too commonly the case – and that’s a bad habit this designer and installer of lighting systems would like to change because of the visual wonders that can be unveiled once the sun goes down.

Night Visions

It's a simple fact: No matter where you are on the globe, ultimately it's dark exactly half the time. So no matter how beautiful your watershapes may be, if you don't fully consider lighting as a key component of your projects, you may be robbing your work of half its potential for pleasing your clients. That makes it a bottom-line issue, because lighting adds real value to most any watershape installation with a long list of benefits. For starters, it extends the time a watershape can be used beyond daylight hours. It also adds

Horses to Engines

When I first begin to do research for a column, I really have little control over the direction I might take. If it's a cut-and-dried technical subject where I'll be dealing primarily with solid, scientific facts, the task is relatively simple. Using my own textbooks, two local libraries and the Internet, I look for my subject matter in a minimum of three separate sources. If the information is identical in each selected source, I feel pretty confident that I can use the data in an article. It isn't always so easy, however, and that's nobody's fault but

Small Solutions

What do you do with a space that seems too small for a watershape and too small for plantings? The answer: Think small. You don't have to compromise on style or substance, but simply by thinking on a smaller scale, you'll open up a lot of possibilities you might not have considered. About three years ago, for example, I was brought in on a job to do a quick fix for a very small but prominent area of a client's yard. The homeowner wanted to completely rework the entire property, but it was clear there was a lot of other work to do first. The quick fix went very well and the clients were pleased, so they asked me to

Fear Not the Future

Not long ago, a gentleman who had attended one of the Genesis 3 schools was discussing an encounter he'd had with some other pool builders. Much to his surprise, one of the people he was talking to told him he'd been crazy for taking the time and spending the money to attend the school. To me, this is indicative of the sort of mentality that holds our industry back. What the Critic was saying was that his colleague was foolish to have attended the equivalent of a college-level course in aquatic design - a course designed to help him advance in his own line of work. It boggles the mind, like that whole "dead architect" question and the difficulty some people have in valuing what we can learn from designers who have gone before us. When I'm asked what we, as exalted pool builders at the turn of the millennium, have to learn from

Pride, Not Pretense

There's an important point about this magazine that I'd like to clarify: A small number of readers have commented that because this magazine tends to

The procession started more than 20 years ago, when those who apply interior finishes to pools, spas and other watershapes began looking beyond white plaster: First came the colored plasters, then pebbles and colored aggregates and, more recently, the polished aggregates. Now, says Kirk Chapman, more new materials and the advent of hybrid approaches are carrying surface specialists to new possibilities limited only by their imaginations.

Subtle at the Surface

Back in 1987 and particularly in California and Florida, the surfacing industry found itself in the middle of an unfortunate wave of plaster failures. Some people blamed the material, others blamed application techniques - and traces of the debate continue to this day. The situation was truly desperate in some areas, so much so that it drove many plasterers to seek new materials and techniques - anything to escape the cycle of negativity. Our firm in San Diego, for example, moved early and became the first in our county to apply exposed-aggregate finishes. Today, more than 80% of