ARTICLES Archives - Page 91 of 314

Communing with Ruth

A brief, late-spring visit to San Francisco gave me the opportunity to be just a tourist there for the first time in many years. Judy and I stayed at a place near Golden Gate Park and spent a long, full day in its huge expanse, moving from one great and wonderful attraction to another. The fact that the Park's museums

Faced with a small site but encouraged by clients who gladly accepted his initial design proposal as presented, Tanr Ross applied all of his skills in creating a backyard environment that combines great entertainment spaces with family fun -- no change orders required!

Shared Vision

As a designer, I am quite familiar with projects that involve a good bit of give and take between me and my clients. You know how it goes: the typical process of success by approximation as you work through sets of possibilities and navigate around a couple dead ends before a design is approved and accepted. In a WaterShapes article earlier this year, for instance, I wrote about the ordeal of developing seven distinct

Pond professionals have a unique opportunity to put food on their clients' tables, writes James Rakocy. All it takes is opening up the design process to a discipline called 'aquaponics,' which puts fish to work in encouraging the growth of a range of water-loving edible plants.

Think Food

When I look at the average pond, I tend to perceive a range of missed opportunities. I come from the world of aquaponics, where I've spent my career figuring out ways to integrate environments for fish and plants in ways that make both fins and leaves grow like crazy. For the most part, I work on an industrial scale, designing facilities where huge populations of fish are grown as food and, nearby, huge

Taking Care

'As obvious as [it] may seem, it's phenomenally easy to lose sight of the immediate importance of healthful habits,' wrote Brian Van Bower in opening his Aqua Culture column in the July/August 2011 edition of WaterShapes. 'I know deep in my heart that being healthy is a long-term commitment, but I also know how easy it is to set that discipline aside.' 'As we make our way through [the busy] summer season, . . . it's easier than usual to set aside concerns about healthy living in favor of

Back to Basics

By early 2015, my folder of saved emails was stuffed with years' worth of questions people wanted me to answer about either their ponds or, as frequently, ponds in general. I decided at that time to answer a number of these inquiries in a video series I've called "Ask the Pond Digger." Most of the questions came from pond owners and do-it-yourselfers, but many others had come from

Smart Steps

'In my observation,' wrote David Tisherman in his Details column for the August 2006 edition of WaterShapes, 'steps tend to be afterthoughts and are seldom fully considered. But I've always taken them seriously because I see them as prime gathering places where people sit, move in and out of the water and in general spend a great deal of time.' 'Children also jump from the steps into the deeper water and

Working far from his U.S. home base is nothing new for Josh Martin. But in the case of the Yas Mall in Abu Dhabi, the scale of the project -- combined with the large number of watershapes and their abundance of precision details -- kept things interesting, one feature after another.

An Exotic Oasis

When it comes to ostentatious and even audacious aquatic displays, there's no doubt that the Middle East now boasts some of the world's most incredible watershapes. Even a quick survey reveals a tremendous range of architectural and hydrological marvels in which technology is paired with grandeur to stunning effect. Several instances of this exuberance appear on

A client's request for a turf edge to go along with his perimeter-overflow pool confronted Brian Van Bower with an unusual challenge -- and led to a solution that serves as the crowning touch for a project filled with watershapes from one side of the property to the other.

Edged in Green

Of all the design trends that have taken hold in watershaping through the past ten years, the one that leads us to work with plenty of slot-edge, perimeter-overflow systems may well be my favorite. I've done them partway and all the way around pools and spas; I've run them up against all sorts of materials, from poured concrete to incredibly beautiful varieties of stone; and, most of all, I've appreciated the skill that goes into installing them and making these water-in-transit

Milestone Time

I was chatting with a high-school friend a couple weeks back - someone I hadn't spoken with in quite a while, so we had lots of catching up to do. Once we passed beyond kids and grandkids and a brief discussion of the vicissitudes of advancing age, he asked how I was spending my time these days and let me know he'd heard through another of our shared friends that I wasn't in the magazine business

The View from Inside

'We water and landscape professionals literally shape the outdoor environments in which we work - cutting grades, building walls, planting trees, installing pools, ponds and fountains and preparing patios, decks, planting beds and lighting systems.' 'In designing these outdoor-living spaces,' noted Bruce Zaretsky in kicking off his On the Level column in