Travelogues & History
By now, the thought that watershape and landscape designers need to study nature if they want to replicate it in their projects is basically a cliché. Truly, if you want to mimic nature successfully, you must first know it intimately. What many miss in all this, I believe, is a deeper level of “knowing” that goes well beyond simply observing nature as a source of techniques and ideas. Frankly, I think that as designers and as human beings, we are much better off when we also learn how to become nature – by which I mean letting the sights, sounds and smells draw us physically into the place. In doing so, we engage in experiences so profound that the mere mentioning of that place will set us off with memories we will share enthusiastically – or can use as parts of our latest projects. No matter how often I visit natural places, I’m always amazed at the
In pre-Colonial days, the neck of the woods now known as Longwood Gardens was a hunting ground for the Lenni Lenape tribe, who prized the area for the richness of its game and timber. Once the British arrived, the land moved under the control of William Penn, founder (and namesake) of Pennsylvania, who sold it to a Quaker family by the name of Pierce in the year 1700. The family farmed the property until 1798, when Joshua and Samuel Pierce began planting an arboretum and the space that would one day become Longwood Gardens was born. Those of us living in the Philadelphia area have long enjoyed the privilege of having this resource in nearby Kennett Square, Pa. It's an amazing place, and I find my way there often because it seems that each time I go, there's something
In pre-Colonial days, the neck of the woods now known as Longwood Gardens was a hunting ground for the Lenni Lenape tribe, who prized the area for the richness of its game and timber. Once the British arrived, the land moved under the control of William Penn, founder (and namesake) of Pennsylvania, who sold it to a Quaker family by the name of Pierce in the year 1700. The family farmed the property until 1798, when Joshua and Samuel Pierce began planting an arboretum and the space that would one day become Longwood Gardens was born. Those of us living in the Philadelphia area have long enjoyed the privilege of having this resource in nearby Kennett Square, Pa. It's an amazing place, and I find my way there often because it seems that each time I go, there's something
What’s the use of knowing about history? For many of us, the answer to that question seems so obvious that it comes as a shock to find out just how many people in the watershaping and landscape fields don’t grasp the all-encompassing significance of our collective past – but it shouldn’t. Using my own career as an example – and even though I now spend a considerable amount of my time teaching professionals and university students all about art and architectural history – I confess that I waltzed through more than a few early years as an aspiring landscape architect and watershaper in blissful ignorance of
‘Any time that you can introduce water or the sound of water into an environment, the space is instantly transformed.’ – Geoffrey Lew Rausch, FASLA, 2006 recipient of the Henry Shaw Medal for his work at the Missouri Botanical Garden During the past three decades, the Missouri Botanical Garden has undergone a wonderful transformation, and much of it has been about water. In that span, more than a dozen fountains and waterfeatures have been added to the 79-acre grounds of what many have long been considered to be one of the top three public gardens in the world – and happily, our firm, Hydro Dramatics of St. Louis, has had the privilege of working on all of them as project leaders. These installations have ranged from the simple to the complex. Whether serene or splashing, barely bubbling or shooting skyward, our work has added a unique spirit and drama to many already-beautiful sites. In addition, they’ve involved us in memorable collaborations with the garden’s creative staff, generous sponsors and the more than 850,000 people who come to the garden annually. For our part, the diversity of the watershapes
The history of residential architecture took a real turn toward mass production with the emergence of the modern suburb early in the 20th Century. Especially in the years after World War II, middleclass families increasingly left urban congestion behind and headed for open outlying areas where developers were hard at work in preparation for their arrival. Some developers put distinct stylistic stamps on the neighborhoods and communities they were building. Among the most popular and recognizable of these styles was the Spanish Colonial Revival - a look that has special prominence on the West Coast but that has surfaced throughout the United States and in places as far flung as Europe and China. This style is so popular and has been used so much in so many variations that it is, these days, tough to nail down exactly what is or is not true to early Spanish Colonial motifs and ideas. That's not surprising, because this malleable style itself represents a cobbling together of ideas borrowed from Roman, Islamic and even Native American cultures. Those deep roots, coupled with a scattering of design focus that has blurred borders and distinctions and any sense of stylistic purity, makes it tough for 21st-century watershapers and other designers to
For the typical visitor, the newly-reopened Getty Villa is perhaps the most exquisite of all possible venues for viewing ancient works of art and craft - reason enough to plan a visit. For students of architecture and design, however, there's much more, particularly the opportunity to immerse yourself in the living, breathing environment of a classic Roman villa and its abundant amenities. The Getty Villa site encompasses 64 acres of a rugged canyon rising above the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, Calif., and was once home to oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. A fanatical collector of Greco-Roman antiquities, he dedicated part of his original ranch-style home as a public museum in 1954. By 1974, less than a year before his death, he had completed and opened the original Villa on another part of the estate, realizing his ambition of creating a public monument dedicated to the arts. The Villa's layout was inspired by the Villa dei Papiri, a first-century country house in Pompeii buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. It was Getty's vision to display his collection in a setting evocative of its contents' historic origins and he realized it, but there were compromises: The spaces were crowded, and the works on display also included samples of paintings and craftworks of much more recent vintage - Renaissance masters, baroque furnishings and other distinctly non-classical artworks. The Villa closed in 1997 at about the same time the
It's a point I'll probably make to the end of my days: There is no substitute for travel and exploration of the historic world to learn about design. In my "Details" column in the June 2005 issue of WaterShapes, for example, I discussed my recent trip to Turkey and made the point that the ruins and intact structures we examined while there were full of specific details that I and other watershapers use in our work - whether or not we recognize that what we're doing actually derives from ancient original works. Showing what I mean in the clearest possible terms is what this pictorial article is all about. As you will see, I've included
It's a truism that almost all contemporary works of art are derivative: The ideas have already been expressed in one way or another at some point in history, and all we can succeed in doing is to apply those enduring forms as creatively as we can. We can't invent the wheel, but we can redraw it, embellish it, place it in context and, in our own ways, improve upon it through the choices we make in using it. To be effective in that sort of downstream effort as watershapers, it is essential that we understand the nature and origins of the basic building blocks of aquatic design. For years, people have asked me where I get my ideas - pools raised out of the ground, the small spillways, the drain details, the modular deck treatments, the color usage and the use of reflection, to name just a few. "Through my design education" is the short answer, of course, but I can get more specific if we
Local historians claim that the image of Philadelphia's Fairmount Water Works was the most reproduced of any industrial site in the United States through the first half of the 19th Century - and for good reason. At that time, the facility represented the absolute state of the art and served as a major point of pride for local residents as well as a source of fascination to visitors from near and far. Throughout its long history, the facility was indeed at the leading edge of water-delivery technology and is now the ideal place to capture and tell the story of the development of environmentalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The story begins
