Travelogues & History
Way back in my Pool Spa News editor days - I want to say circa 1990, but I may be off by a year or two - we ran a piece on a waterfeature built by Mike Stachel of Mt. Lake Pool & Patio (Doylestown. Pa.) to meet the needs of the Philadelphia Zoo's relentlessly cute capybaras.
I've forgotten all of the details of the article (which, as a small twist of fate would have it, was written by future WaterShapes editor Eric Herman) other than the relentless cuteness of the creatures for whom the watershape was built, but enough of the memory of the project lingered that I made a point of stopping by the zoo while visiting the city ten or twelve years later to see how the critters were getting on. I also wanted to see whether they were as darned cute in person as they had been in Mike's photographs.
I wasn't prepared in any way for the fact that they were actually too large to be considered cute. They were taller and longer and more girthsome than the photos I'd seen had led me to believe. I couldn't help thinking of them as supersized squirrels with bigger, sharper teeth and voracious appetites to match. The horror . . .
Fortunately, there was much else to see at the zoo. Before I was anywhere near the capybara enclosure, in fact, I strolled up to and past the Impala Fountain and knew I'd come back for a longer look once I'd paid my respects to my rodent friends and Mike Stachel's handiwork.
The Impala Fountain belongs to a class of waterfeatures for which I have something of a weakness - that is, fountains that feature wild animals interacting with water. I love the horses running up the steps at the entrance of Denver's Mile-High Stadium, for example, and I'm truly smitten by the mustangs that race across the stream in williams square irving,
The difference in this case is that the impalas (executed between 1950 and 1963 by Philadelphia sculptor Henry Mitchell, are distinctly abstract - basically skeletonized versions of a dozen of these great and amazing leapers set in an arc above fountain jets, doubtless in flight from one sort of predator or another.
To me, this is an ideal combination of sculpture and water where the kinetic nature of the fountain jets lends a direct sense of movement to the static sculptural elements. It's simply drop-dead gorgeous - and well worth a visit the next time you visit the Philadelphia Zoo to see Mike Stachel's fearsome capybaras.
I love the fact that she was a friend and compatriot to Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and other leading lights among the abstract expressionists. I love that she lived to be 98 and, just before her death in 2010, was still engaged enough by the world around her to start communicating through her art in support of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. I love her name, which would have been the perfect alias for an avant-garde artist of the 20th Century but for the fact that it's really hers. Finally, I love her big sculptures, including the 25-foot-tall one in Agnes R. Katz Park in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Maybe the only thing about Louise Bourgeois' work I think I don't like is that she decided that the 25-foot-tall one in Katz Park would make a good fountain. I just have to disagree with her decision and don't find myself being satisfied or happy in its presence.
The park took shape in 1998 and was dedicated to the memory of Ms. Katz, a prominent patron of the arts. The fountain sculpture dominates the space, which was designed by the renowned architect Michael Graves in collaboration with Daniel Urban Kiley, a distinguished landscape architect, as well as Ms. Bourgeois, who also contributed three paired benches (seen partly in the photo above by Daderot | Wikipedia) that, because of their shapes, have lent the space its nickname: "Eyeball Park."
I savor the oddly disturbing eyeball benches and admire the towering nearby structure as a sculpture, but as I mentioned above, I have my problems with it as a fountain. Yes, I get the symbolism of the two flows at the top joining into a single flow down the structure and its supposed reference to the Allegheny and Monongahela coming together in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. But the water element nonetheless seems forced: The sculpture existed before its placement was a consideration; Ms. Bourgeois was a committed New Yorker rather than a Pittsburgher; and I can't help thinking that the plumbing might have been an afterthought?
Mainly, I'm bothered by the timid way the water flows down through the sculpture's levels: It starts out nicely enough at the top but flows unenergetically downward, sometimes narrowing, sometimes expanding as it drops, leaving the structure mostly dry. I tried to convince myself that this worked; ultimately, however, I just couldn't buy it.
Even though it doesn't transport me, however, I do appreciate the fact that the tower runs with heated water and flows a considerate 365 days a year. It was springtime when I saw it, but I wish I'd seen it draped in icicles in the dead of winter (as seen in some photos linked below). I've always been a sucker for the concept of frozen waterfalls, streams and fountains, so, for part of the year at least, this fountain might just win me over.
For all my criticism, I still think it's a great little park in the heart of the city's thriving cultural district - well worth a visit. And frankly, I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who can offer a persuasive defense of the project, because it's pretty clear to me that I'm looking for reasons to appreciate this composition as much as I like so much of Louise Bourgeois' other work!
To see a video of the fountain in operation, click here.
To see the fountain partly covered in ice, click here.
Please don't hold it against me: I was an English Literature major in college.
My specialty was the old stuff - Shakespeare's plays, the comedies of the Restoration period, poets from John Milton to Alexander Pope, and the early novelists, especially Jane Austen. It was mostly a pursuit of things written before about 1820 and kept me more than busy.
About eight months after I graduated in 1977, I took off and traveled the world for the best part of a year, spending May and June of 1978 in England and devotedly seeking out places where my favorite subjects of study had lived and worked and found inspiration. I went to the places where the great theaters had been and tramped along rivers and city streets listening for echoes and seeing if there was anything left that would attach me to the life experiences of my literary heroes.
It was all fairly thin until I reached the city of Bath, where Jane Austen had centered so many scenes in her great novels. Back in 1978, the place hadn't changed all that much since she'd lived there; it still embodied a mood and architectural style that easily carried me back 200 years to her time.
For all of her virtues, however, Miss Austen wasn't hugely impressed by Bath or at all into the one feature of the city that most thoroughly captured my imagination while I was there - that is, the natural watershapes that gave the town its name and had defined its function at least since the Romans reached England nearly 2,000 years earlier.
I'm mindful of the fact that I took this trip well before watershaping came to define my own function and life. Even then, however, I was blown away by the thought that the Romans had settled in this place around 70 A.D. and had converted the site's warm springs into a system of pools to serve as an early spa.
Not much is visible from those times; in fact, the baths were basically forgotten and buried after the Romans left a couple centuries later and were only rediscovered in Shakespeare's time. But seeing the still-visible parts of the Roman baths in person - and absorbing all I could about their inner workings from a memorable museum exhibit - I felt as though I was witnessing history in the grandest and most personal way possible.
When you take that history and surround it with graceful Georgian architecture, the package Bath offers its visitors is quite complete and unique. And so tasteful, I might add, that I have to think that even a Roman would have been pleased to see their baths set amid such a splendid and sociably neoclassical context.
No, you can't "take the waters" the way they did when Jane Austen was around, but it's well worth a visit: For inspiration, the baths of Bath can't be beat.
The first time I saw it, the water of the Linton E. Allen Memorial Fountain had been turned off for servicing. In that inert condition and with tiny figures creeping over its greenish surface, it looked to me as though a squat flying saucer had dropped in to slurp up water from Lake
One of the nicest days I've ever spent as publisher of WaterShapes came when I joined editor Eric Herman and our good friend William Rowley on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., one spring day in 2006. Bill was working there on the resuscitation of the swimming pool at the old Marion Davies estate. In the 1920s, she had been William Randolph Hearst's paramour. When she wanted a house built on
In my various trips near and far, I ve occasionally experienced fountains that function only sporadically. if you'll recall, for example, i wrote in december 2012 about ricardo legorreta's purple aqueduct los angeles'pershing square, which, i've been told, runs when the local water table permits it which is why had to visit square three times before witnessed operation.
I've also seen fountains that were installed with either official names or no names at all - but that are universally referred to by locals with other, generally less-respectful names. I wrote in June 2013 about the Inverted Fountain on the UCLA campus, for instance, mentioning that irreverent students (at least of my generation) called it the Perpetual Toilet because of the familiar way the water circled so voluminously into its drain.
Now I offer up a fountain that scores big in both of these odd categories: It's an unnamed fountain in Portland, Ore., that has what is often complained of as an overly sensitive wind sensor that shuts the water off completely at what seems the slightest provocation. It also has the distinction of looking a bit like the sprayer bar in a commercial convenience, so most people call it the Car Wash Fountain.
Made up of rows of curving metal tubes, the fountain was installed in its compact Portland park in 1977 with a design from the firm of Carter, Hull, Nishita, McCulley and Baxter. (Nishita had been an associate of Lawrence Halprin's, but separation from the great man evidently led him on a different stylistic path.) The spray jets apparently make pedestrians miserable when the wind blows (which it often does in Portland), so when the breeze reaches a scant two miles an hour, the water stops flowing. This low threshold makes it a bit too easy to find the Car Wash closed for business.
I have to say that I'm not terribly fond of this fountain - and it's only partially the result of having had the misfortune of stopping by to see it on a cold, blustery day. Basically, I don't think it's an attractive contribution to the cityscape; I'd also like to think it was incumbent on the designers to recognize the problems even a gentle breeze in this particular location would cause with their fountain's basic operation.
That doesn't mean the fountain isn't worth a visit: People who write about Portland's attractions look at it with obvious pride - and it's not just because they like referring to it as the Car Wash Fountain. Maybe it's just me?
Then as now, I look on the bright side: The Car Wash Fountain is within easy walking distance of a bunch of other fine Portland fountains, and it's hard to stay upset when you have about a mile to walk to the Keller and Lovejoy fountains - two of Halprin's masterpieces.
For a very brief video showing the fountain in action, click here.
Some fountains are great because they are aesthetically amazing; others are on the less-spectacular side but have great stories or commemorate worthy persons or events. Happily, still other fountains deliver the whole package: They are beautiful to behold and intricately woven into their local histories and cultures.
One watershape in that special third category is the Nicholas J. Melas Centennial Fountain in Chicago. It celebrates the lifetime achievements of its namesake, who, for 30 years from 1962 on, was a commissioner on the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago - a man doubtless worthy of the honor.
But what's cooler in my book is the Centennial part of the fountain's nomenclature: It was commissioned on the Chicago River in 1989 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of a government agency whose single greatest achievement was, around 1900, reversing the flow of the Chicago River: They turned it around to keep it from flowing into and polluting the city's Lake Michigan water supply.
Today this all sounds like ecological blasphemy, but before the water district accomplished this clever engineering feat, waterborne diseases including typhoid and cholera ravaged the population whenever the river ran high enough to flush its burden of pollution into the lake. As the historic summary linked below indicates, Chicago as we know it might not exist had this problem not been so thoughtfully addressed.
I love the fountain's rich backstory - and the way it looks, too. Designed by Lohan Associates of Chicago (now Lohan Anderson), the stacked, stepped style perfectly befits the Modernism that is so much a part of downtown Chicago's look and appeal. The composition also includes a water cannon that shoots an eight-story-high arc of water across the river - a spectacular display that (Chicago's famous winds permitting!) shoots on the hour for ten-minute stretches.
There's so much to see in Chicago - and so much of it has to do with water - that every watershaper should visit the city, probably more than once, in the course of a professional lifetime. Please do add this wonderful fountain to your itinerary the next time you go!
For a bit of Chicago River history, click here. For a brief video that shows the fountain and water cannon in action, click here.
It's been a number of years since I've managed to visit Chicago, but I want to get back sometime soon. After all, I have yet to see the Crown Fountain in person (let alone the rest of Millennium Park), and I haven't visited the Chicago Botanic Garden in more than 30 years! The last time I was in the Windy City with any time to spare, it was 2002 and I was attending
As mentioned previously, I've traveled to Seattle with fair frequency through the past few years. Mostly I'm there to visit my mother on Bainbridge Island, but I've also given myself enough time to explore the area that I almost know my way around the city and its many public watershapes. On one trip a couple years back, I took the usual ferry ride from the island back to Seattle on my way to the airport, arriving in plenty of time for a leisurely stroll from the boat terminal to the metro station a few blocks away. My semi-roundabout path took me right by Pioneer Square, a place
I hesitated in starting the New Year with a Travelogue about a class of watershape that is located beyond easy reach of most readers and is, in addition, one I've never seen personally. But I ran across a reference to these structures a couple days ago, and I just can't get them out of my mind.
Many times in the past, WaterShapes has mentioned the fact that, hundreds of years ago, Islamic architects used fountains and runnels of moving water as air-conditioning systems in enclosed spaces (the Alhambra in Moorish Spain being the usual example). Hundreds of years before that, it seems, Indian architects achieved a similar effect with what they called baolis, or step wells.
For starters, I was a bit startled to find an approach to watershaping I'd never encountered before - but what truly blew my mind was the scale of these structures and the attention their designers paid to the aesthetics of what is basically a utilitarian water source. Indeed, step wells are literally that: structures in which water is reached by descending sets of steps. Found most often in western India, they also were built in other places in southern Asia as well as Pakistan.
Basically, they serve as graduated storage tanks that enabled communities to cope with seasonal changes in water availability: They filled with ground- or well water during the rainy season and were drawn down when the dry, hot weather returned each year. Unlike a classic western fountainhead, which gave a few people access to the water at a time, some of these step wells are huge and clearly enabled whole communities of people (and sometimes their animals) to get at the water at the same time.
and there was more even in hot weather, the body of water pit well cooled air, so grand watershapes became social hubs places to beat heat commune with friends, family acquaintances an office cooler on a scale.
The only similar structure I've seen in the United States is the Fort Worth Water Gardens, which I wrote about in the January 25, 2012 edition of this newsletter (click here). But Philip Johnson's project featured cascading water, which is distinctly something a classic step well didn't offer.
In any case, this is special watershaping - on the level of the Roman aqueducts in terms of importance to their communities. I hope you enjoy this introduction and, like me, think these places might be worth a road trip.
To see the brief video that introduced me to these amazing watershapes, click here - and do what you can to ignore the narrator's attempts at humor. And if you want more information, click here to see an unusually helpful Wikipedia trove of information and images.dsc+
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