Identifying the Issue

It’s an unfortunate fact that landscape architects receive little or no formal education in watershaping while they’re in school. As a result, where the typical landscape architect’s irrigation plan will show every pipe, fitting, wire and component for a given project, that same project’s pool plan will carry almost no detail at all.

This phenomenon begs the question: Why don’t our colleges and universities do more to educate landscape architects about watershaping?

The answer to this question causes me double pain, because I know full well that landscape architecture programs fill valuable space that would be better occupied by watershaping and devote it instead to a half-dozen civil-engineering topics that convey little of real value to landscape students. Why spend two or three intensive weeks on surveying, road design and regional watershed calculations – none of which fall under the ultimate purview of landscape architects – while something as practical and fundamental as watershaping gets no coverage at all?

As a university instructor myself, my observation is that most faculty and staff ignore this gap in what they teach because they aren’t inclined to concede that they know nothing about the subject and may even feel threatened by the need of having to turn to contractors to learn something. The upshot, as I have mentioned before in WaterShapes, is that everything I currently know about working with ornamental and recreational water is the product of self-education and exposure to people and organizations within the pool industry.

PROVIDING SOLUTIONS

In the past decade, I’ve spent countless hours teaching design students about water, and I’ve found that most of them crave far more watershaping knowledge than they’ve ever been offered. (Last year in this magazine, I chronicled some of what I’ve experienced so far in a brief series titled “Future Class.”)

As this effort moved forward, I’ve found that the scope and design of such a specialized curriculum has kept on evolving, so now, as I assume a role in this rotating “Currents” column, I’m going to track that evolution and will start here with a brief update on what I see as the anatomy of this type of course.

To recap, in the past few academic years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with students and capture the attention of both instructors and administrators in the landscape architecture department at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Based on the reception for my water-based courses, this year’s standard classes have once again been restructured to feature special, week-long workshops – and a water program is one of the modules.

This “Water Module” focuses on what these students must know in order to consider watershaping as one of their capabilities. It’s only an introduction, of course, but even in a week’s time we’ve been able to define key parameters and give class participants a basic, working knowledge of how to use decorative and recreational water in their landscapes.

In establishing the workshop, I identified all of the tools that these professionals-to-be lacked and integrated them into a lecture/laboratory approach that is familiar to them. As I see it, even this compact set of lessons is a foot in the door – a necessary first step in developing a program that, someday, might actually produce graduates of what might be called a “School of Water Architecture.”

In developing material for this concentrated treatment, I’ve honed the subject matter into clear units so students can grasp enough of the importance of each concept that they’ll be inclined to seek additional information. To be sure, each of these topics merits a full course of its own, but we must start somewhere.

DISTINCT ELEMENTS

In just a week’s time, this leaves us to plow our way through a broad range of key topics, including:

[ ] History: This unit counters the popular assumption that swimming pools are a modern innovation that took root in the early decades of the 20th Century. The reality is that watershaping has been pursued for millennia in various forms, with some of the oldest “pools” having been built in what is now Pakistan some 4,000 years ago.

Introducing students to any field’s past is part of all comprehensive educational programs, whether the subject is engineering, literature or mathematics. As I see it, learning about the lineage and developmental history of pools and fountains is crucial to progress – and absolutely essential if any of these students is ever to get involved in reproducing period pieces. In grander terms, the aim here is to prepare students to do more than mimic what they see around them and instead set them up to draw on the past as a platform for future innovation.

[ ] Industry Operations: The watershaping industry has been around for quite some time, but it has recently been undergoing significant transformations in response to increasingly sophisticated consumer demand as well as increasingly stringent licensing, codes and construction protocols.

Good Terms As I’ve worked to develop courses on watershaping for landscape architecture students, I’ve learned just how critical vocabulary can be in creating acceptance for information and driving home the importance of shared literacy when it comes to communicating key ideas. That’s why I’ve always loved the inclusiveness of key terms associated with this magazine, such as “watershape,” “watershaping,” and “watershaper.” Each one is punchy, clear and extremely useful. In my opinion, however, in the academic world we need a different term better suited to a scholarly pursuit, and my suggestion here is “water architecture,” which I would define as the art and science of designing watershapes. Water architecture is a design process that deploys the fundamentals of architecture in the creation of watershapes such as pools, fountains, ponds, lakes, interactive features and more. If the term has legs, it will also come to describe the academic discipline that focuses on developing students’ understanding of all aspects of watershaping. M. H.

In that context, the processes of taking a watershape from concept to fruition has become remarkably convoluted and almost invariably involves unique twists and turns – a cluster of pathways not at all familiar to the vast majority of landscape architects. (This is one of the key reasons landscape architects are generally so reluctant to wrestle with water in their projects.)

Shining a light on the murkier parts of watershaping business is therefore a key component in any comprehensive educational program for landscape architects. As it stands now, most landscape architects are ignorant of the simplest aspects of watershaping. As I see it, basic knowledge of industry players and dynamics will better enable these future professionals to make certain their designs are built as intended.

[ ] Hydraulic Technology: One new feature of watershaping that no historical survey will reveal is the extent to which changing (and advancing) technologies are affecting modern watershaping. Hydraulics as a science has been around for thousands of years, but high-efficiency heaters, ozone generators and motorized valve actuators (among many other devices) have been with us for only a short time, relatively speaking.

There are very few places for landscape architects to go and learn about these products – another big reason why they rely so easily and heavily on contractors for this sort of information and support. And this is despite the fact that discussions of technology and how different technologies relate to one another are commonly part of the design curriculum in colleges and universities. Indeed, such discussions have always been part of the landscape-construction units I teach in standard university courses.

As mentioned above, landscape architects may leave school knowing the minutiae of irrigation plans, but up to now they have never focused on technologies related specifically to watershapes. This unit is a first step in addressing that information gap and in explaining how pumps and filters and more fit into the picture.

[ ] Engineering: Geotechnical and structural considerations are among the keystones of watershaping, yet they’re seldom part of the education of landscape architects. As a result, when one of their future clients asks for a pool on the crest of a hillside in highly expansive soils, few landscape architects will be aware of the need to factor some very costly (and high liability) thinking into their design work.

All experienced watershapers know (or should know, at any rate) that soil conditions dictate the nature of the structure required to make a given design work for the long haul. In many cases, however, these structures are so extensive that they cannot be built within available budgets and are subsequently either constructed inadequately or undergo major alterations once the construction process begins.

Knowing about bedding planes and how concrete and steel work together in support structures for watershapes eliminates many of these issues, while understanding how much these interventions cost also helps preclude preparation of designs that lack essential information needed for quality project execution. What they learn, in other words, is that what might seem at first glance to be a $100,000 pool might turn out to be a $750,000 pool with a completely different set of physical design parameters.

[ ] Concept & Presentation: The majority of the plans for watershapes reviewed by my firm, Holdenwater of Fullerton, Calif., are ghost-like outlines with little or no indication of any essential components. My business associates and I speak both “landscape architect” and “contractor,” so we perform as interpreters and make certain people are having apples-to-apples conversations.

If landscape architects were to become more knowledgeable about watershapes, the apples-to-oranges bidding process would cease to be the huge issue it is today. That’s the rationale for this unit, in which we discuss the need for watershape designs and graphic representations that are both more refined and more elaborate at the same time.

To that end, I teach students to draw not only the waterline, but also the coping, steps, benches and depths, all of which have tended to be been absent from landscape architects’ pool designs. I’m also striving to teach them to represent the character of water in presentations, meaning they need to understand and differentiate water that moves, splashes, sprays, cascades, dances and sheets – or lies still.

Ultimately, better informed conceptual design and graphics presentation will help eliminate water-related disconnections from the general design vocabulary – a step that will help rid watershaping of a problem that has plagued it for years.

[ ] Materials: The selection of materials used in watershapes has a tremendous influence on the character of a design as well as the durability of the watershape itself, yet even professional watershapers often lack much by way of knowledge about materials beyond a very narrow set of options. Watershape education therefore should familiarize students with both the broad realm of possibilities – and with the limitations of certain selections as well.

We know, for example, that harsh chemicals and various mechanical challenges are present in watershape environments. This is why we don’t run plaster up a raised bond beam where it would be exposed to wet/dry conditions and instead interrupt the flow of that material with the familiar six-inch band of waterline tile. Care must also be taken, for example, with wood decks used around watershapes.

Through materials education, aspiring watershapers will learn how to work within such constraints while also identifying a far wider range of possible solutions.

[ ] Construction Methods, Materials and Costs: Contractors employ common sets of methods in building watershapes. As an example, they may use shotcrete or gunite most of the time but will readily shift to poured-in-place concrete to shape shells where pneumatically placed concrete isn’t the right choice. To guide these projects, landscape architects should be aware of the distinctions in these applications as well as the relative costs, uses and limits of these products and processes.

In short, students of landscape architecture need to be aware of the entirety of what their landscapes are made of, including their watershapes, just as well as they might know plants, irrigation systems, lighting and masonry. Without a “watershape vocabulary,” their designs will only be rough ideas of what can be achieved in terms of construction. By understanding methods of watershape construction, however, these future professionals will enjoy greater freedom to design and reach for elevated aesthetics.

[ ] Resources: A typical watershaper’s office shelves are full of catalogs and binders about products and services available to their industry – as are the shelves of landscape architects, although usually with a different set of printed material. To synchronize these valuable collections of information, this unit aims to define all of the tools students have at their disposal.

Even if they never actually specify a skimmer, for example, they need to know what one looks like to accommodate it within a physical design and where to go and how to navigate the supply chain to get the products their projects might need.

To function well in this realm, students need to have their eyes opened to the components of basic watershaping. Again, this is only an introduction, but they need to know the names of key suppliers and have some sense of delivery timelines and local product availability to function capably in the watershaping realm.

ADAPTATIONS

It is my strong, personal belief that watershape education will eventually be a permanent component of every landscape architecture program. I see the situation as being not unlike irrigation, which was once found only in the disciplines of agricultural engineering but is now a fixture in every landscape architecture program.

It only makes sense to clear a slot in the educational registry for watershaping, given how concerned we all are these days about overall environmental design. If profit isn’t sufficient motivation on its own, then consider the general need to accommodate clients who are looking for truly complete design programming and execution.

As mentioned above, I’ve been on a quest to inject watershaping into the landscape architecture curriculum for years now, and I see signs that this “new” discipline may well be the next big thing to catch hold in the halls of our colleges and universities.

To watch this trend emerge, all one needs to do is note how many landscape architects are visiting pool-industry trade shows these days – or note the increasing number of pool vendors now advertising in landscape-oriented trade magazines. The key in all this, the factor that ultimately will force a change, is the enthusiasm of students who are lucky enough to have gained exposure to some or any form of watershape education.

These students already know that the creative use of water in the landscape is one of the most potent design elements at their disposal, and they want to know how to wield it. Their time has come!

Mark Holden is a landscape architect, pool contractor and teacher who owns and operates Holdenwater, a design/build/consulting firm based in Fullerton, Calif., and is founder of Artistic Resources & Training, a school for watershape designers and builders. He may be reached via e-mail at [email protected].