ARTICLES Archives - Page 86 of 317

Adding Up

It was entirely coincidental, but the last edition of the WaterShapes digital newsletter included two of the most popular of all articles ever to appear on our Web site: Tommy T. Cook's "Casting Nature," which originally appeared in the printed magazine in November 2010; and Scott Cohen's "Beware of Exploding Lava Rocks," which was published exclusively through the newsletter on March 16, 2011. It's easy to recall how popular

The revitalization of Longwood Gardens' Main Fountain Garden is nearly complete -- an ideal time, notes Robert Nonemaker, to step up with a progress report as well as a preview of some of the awesome, breathtaking upgrades being applied to this 80-year-old treasure.

Digging Deep

Three words come to mind when I consider what's been happening with the Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens for the last two-and-a-half years: ambitious, audacious and amazing. The people behind the project, from Longwood's management team to all of the outside players who signed on to get the work done, were supremely ambitious in deciding to reconstruct a historic national treasure - first commissioned in 1931 - and bring it abruptly up to 21st-century standards for performance, automation and serviceability. They were audacious to the extent that they decided that all of this should happen in plain view, with no visual obstructions to hide what was going on from the public at large - no construction pen, no yellow tape, no barriers of any kind to keep the observers who crowd the fountain's famed Conservatory Terrace from seeing exactly what was happening with their beloved water display. But so amazing! Although it had been in decline

Worst Expressions

Through all my years of writing these Travelogues, I have discussed less than a handful of traveler-accessible watershapes that didn't make the grade. It wasn't that they were horrible, but rather that they were a little bit "off" in my estimation. Just recently, however, I saw a fountain that should never have been built - it just wasn't worth the bother - and it's the first time in writing more than 100 of these essays that I'm actually advising

Needing to testify to the sustainability of a fountain project is now common. The good news, writes Robert Mikula, is that it's becoming easier to defend the inclusion of any type of watershape if you make resource conservation a clear, distinct, reachable goal from the get-go.

Beyond the Tap

As purveyors of fountains and other forms of decorative or recreational water, watershapers are faced these days by an immediate challenge: What we do is generally classified as "unsustainable" by an environmentally conscious public because they erroneously assume poor performance when it comes to the way we approach water consumption, use of space and energy efficiency. On the surface, these are serious knocks on

The Currency of Beauty

By David Tisherman ‘Watershaping isn’t a job to me,’ wrote David Tisherman in the March 2002 edition of WaterShapes. ‘It’s my passion, which explains why I’m so obsessed with steel and concrete and water and what I can

Some clients want all the benefits of a manufactured spa to go along with their inground pools. As Dave Hoffman explains here, there's a ready-made option for these folks, one that's easy to design into a poolscape so long as you keep a few basic practicalities in mind.

A Fuller Experience

I'd hazard the guess that most experienced pool designers and builders have run into this scenario: The clients want a pool, and they also want a spa - but not just any spa will do. Through the years, these clients have been in the attached spas of friends' inground concrete pools, but this is not what they want. That's because they've also experienced portable spas and prefer their performance: superior jet action, diverse seating arrays and options, more features and

Pee’s in the Air

All of a sudden three weeks ago, the Internet caught fire with what seems to be its annual round of stories about urine in swimming pools. As best I can tell, the story's current incarnation began with a March 1 report on the Web site of National Public Radio about research conducted by a group of Canadian chemists: These folks figured out that they could

To win this backyard project in competition with three big Atlanta architecture firms, Shane LeBlanc had to call on his eye for grand-scale details in creating a delightfully asymmetrical poolscape -- one that looks polished, inviting and fun from every conceivable angle.

Riverside Recreation

Sometimes, things come together in just the right way. I'd been called in to a multimillion-dollar property with a large, three-year-old house on it, right next to the Chattahoochee River on the northwestern fringe of Atlanta. There was an existing pool, but the homeowners wanted something new - a composition that befitted the home's elegance and said more about

Through the years, Brian Davis has been asked to try all sorts of 'wonder products' -- a process that has made him so skeptical that he tests almost everything he sees. As he discusses here, that included a thermo-polymer option to Portland cement-based pool finishes.

Weighing Possibilities

As a general contractor, I am steadily bombarded by information about new products that claim they will forever change the way I look at whatever category the novel gizmo occupies. This sort of marketing has turned me into a skeptic whenever I see something new come along, basically because experience and communication with other contractors have showed me that few of these novelties ever fully live up to the hype. Some contractors respond to this slippery situation by sticking solely with what they know, which, in my view, is

Making the List

'When I teach seminars on watershape design,' wrote Brian Van Bower in opening his Aqua Culture column ten years ago, 'I always emphasize the importance of having a list of questions to ask prospective clients during initial conversations. It's a point that always seems to ignite discussion - and it usually ends up with someone in the audience asking me to provide such a document for general use. 'I always refuse to do so, not because I