I know that I promised to start a string of blogs on my likes and dislikes in watershape design, but the news from the Genesis 3 Design Group about Skip Phillips and Brian Van Bower parting ways with David Tisherman must jump to the head of the line. I have watched these three gentlemen at work, separately and together, for
The last time I visited Dallas on business, I kept a crucial side trip in mind: I just had to see the Fort Worth Water Gardens with my own eyes. Designed by New York architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee and completed in 1974, the space has been iconic since day one. The way the space lures you in, drawing you past
Up until 64 years ago, swimming pools had a lot in common with Henry Ford’s early cars: Just as you could get a Model A in any color so long as it was black, you could get a swimming pool of any size or shape so long as it was rectangular. Renowned landscape architect Thomas Church changed all that in 1948 with the kidney-shaped Donnell pool – and has left succeeding generations of watershape designers to face the challenge of helping their clients find the right-shaped pool for their given settings. Church was blessed with an open-minded California client who wanted a “pool as art,” with the practicalities of swimming treated as a secondary consideration. And Church delivered, big time: The pool’s flowing form was inspired by
What type of swimming pool do you put in the backyard of a Craftsman-style home? This question, presented during a course on 20th-century architecture I taught at the pool show in Las Vegas last November, is easy to ask but difficult to answer. In fact, this is
Secrets of a Senior Triathlete'sSuccess in His Grueling Event
I’ve spent 50 of my years living in Southern California – an exhilarating half-century in which I’ve spent a lot of time, man and boy, in the presence of watershapes of various forms and sizes. The experiences I’ve had have filled me with opinions about the nature of these bodies of water and their accoutrements, so
This is a rather unusual Travelogue: I’d sat down to write a blog about the influence of hotel and resort pools on the way homeowners develop expectations of what can be done in their own backyards, and I recognized almost immediately that
Almost every advertisement for watershapes I’ve ever seen in a newspaper or the Yellow Pages says something about “custom” this or “custom” that. It always leads me to wonder how to differentiate between the “custom,” “high-end” and “luxury” pools others devise and the “architectural pools” or, better yet, the “aquatic art” I strive to create. I prefer the last two terms because
