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When the soil expands beneath a concrete swimming-pool deck, the pressure can turn the finest slab work into an unsightly clash of cracked planes and angles. There are ways to overcome this soil expansiveness, says a veteran structural engineer, but it takes knowing what you’re up against – and a fair degree of patience.
Expansion Solutions
Put yourself in your customer's swim suit for a moment: You're floating in a lounge chair in your pool, taking in the surroundings and proud ofwhat you and your family now enjoy. As you scan the perimeter of the pool, you spot something you're certain wasn't there the last time you looked. Yes, you're sure of it:  A portion of the deck seems to be rising above the backside of the coping. Instead of continuing to enjoy a lazy afternoon's float, you now start to
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When the soil expands beneath a concrete swimming-pool deck, the pressure can turn the finest slab work into an unsightly clash of cracked planes and angles. There are ways to overcome this soil expansiveness, says a veteran structural engineer, but it takes knowing what you’re up against – and a fair degree of patience.
Expansion Solutions
Put yourself in your customer's swim suit for a moment: You're floating in a lounge chair in your pool, taking in the surroundings and proud ofwhat you and your family now enjoy. As you scan the perimeter of the pool, you spot something you're certain wasn't there the last time you looked. Yes, you're sure of it:  A portion of the deck seems to be rising above the backside of the coping. Instead of continuing to enjoy a lazy afternoon's float, you now start to
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On paper, reports Ben Dixon, the design fired everyone’s imagination by taking a garden-variety, linear waterfall and enhancing the visual effect with a set of serpentine twists and turns. But making that effect work on site was a different matter – one that called for ingenuity on the part of the construction crew as well as the waterfall system’s supplier.
Custom Contours
This waterfall could've been built in either of two ways:  A system of internal reservoirs and a long, narrow nozzle could've been formed as part of the structure itself, a task that would've placed huge burdens on the forming crew and the person shooting the gunite; or a manufactured fixture could be used to create the desired effect. Sensibly, the folks at Tango Pools in Las Vegas chose to pursue the latter option, deciding it would be better to
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From standard coping and cantilevered decks to boulders and plants and rock veneers, watershapers are using an ever-broadening palette of edge treatments to accentuate and refine their designs. In this photo-essay, veteran landscape architect Peter White illustrates the boundless possibilities that present themselves when it comes to setting up boundaries at water’s edge.
Designs on Edge
To my way of thinking, one of the most fundamental considerations in any landscape design has to do with understanding how the major elements blend visually with each other and their immediate surroundings.  When that design includes water - be it a pond, stream, fountain, pool or spa - the key to effective visual blending depends to an overwhelming degree on how you define the internal boundaries within the design. This is so because of a couple of crucial visual concepts:  First, we all know that
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