A paperback edition of Francis D.K. Ching's book, Architecture: Forms, Space and Order, had been sitting on my desk for less than a day when my colleague and friend Mark Webb spotted it and became pretty animated. He started talking about the book in a way that made it seem it was a given that we both should be completely familiar with it. I had, in fact, just picked up my copy at a used bookstore without ever having heard of Ching or knowing anything about his highly influential body of work. I soon learned that Webb and many other architecture and landscape architecture students (beyond yours truly) read Ching's work early on in their studies. Feeling as though I'd missed out on something important in my education, I dove into the text and soon came to understand why my friend
I spent ten days this last December traveling in Turkey - my second visit to the country in the past several years and a trip that reinforced vivid memories of just how mind-expanding a place it is. The Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires all held sway over this patch of land at times during the past 2,500 years, and throughout that long history, these and other great civilizations of both East and West have made their marks on the place. Situated at the crossroads of land- and sea-trade routes between Europe and Asia, Turkey has vast, rich reserves to drawn upon when it comes to
Watershapers are still fairly easily divided into two groups, one with its origins in the landscape trades, the other hailing from the pool industry. For all the distinctions that might be drawn between them, however, watershapers of all stripes have one very important thing in common: We all work with the stuff we find under our feet on the job site - the stuff we generally call dirt or soil. Dirt is the more inclusive of the two terms, and unless the contractor is working with a tricky site or faces compaction issues, it is simply what is carted away or rearranged to make room for a watershape. By contrast, soil is a blanket term covering
Last time, we began a discussion of giving our clients the satisfying hot-water experience they crave with a review of basic design principles and coverage of a range of materials-selection issues. Translating the good on-site positioning and great materials we surveyed in February into a luxurious spa experience requires the designer to have an advanced understanding of the technology at work in hydrotherapy as well as a grasp of the spectrum of options available to drive and control hot-water systems. Before we address those key topics, however, it bears
I love the fact that more and more people I talk to are referring to the bodies of water they create as works of art. At their best, watershapes do indeed possess all the aesthetic potential of
Take the world's most prolific consumer technology company on one hand and, on the other, its desire to augment its corporate headquarters with a natural exterior environment intended to capture geological processes that span millions of years: It's a collision of present and past, of technology and nature, that is filled with meaning as well as exciting potential. Those sorts of thoughts and paradoxes were somewhere on everyone's minds as we approached the design and installation of a grand-scale watershape at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., corporate campus. Our aim: to create a spectacular and entirely
Developing a simple, reliable swimming pool alarm system offers a remarkable range of technical challenges, observes Robert Jechart of RJE Technologies - even when your point of departure is years of experience with ultra-sophisticated military and commercial sonar technology. Here, he discusses a four-year process in which his company has addressed its goal of making watershapes safe for families with small children.
For years, we at Sunshine Pools & Spas have provided high-end, custom swimming pools to a mostly affluent clientele in and around our base in Kelowna, British Columbia. Unlike many readers of this magazine, however, we specialize in satisfying those clients with vinyl-liner rather than gunite or shotcrete pools. To be sure, pools and spas of any sort are not the first things that come to mind when you think about our area, which is closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to the Sunbelt. But many residents around here do enjoy the good life and want
Great watershaping is, we believe, all about creating forms within a context. The thoughtful watershaper will survey all the key elements of a project while conjuring a mental picture that's as close to the architect's vision as possible - and then base the work that follows on a solid understanding of both the design and the setting. It's always most exciting when we're asked to consult with the designer about a project before the lot has been graded and the ideas are still flowing onto the sketchpad. In those cases where the designer and homeowner are all the same person and those initial discussions involve the designer's own living space, the nature of this interaction can truly be something special. At Pure Water Pools, we've had such a privilege on two occasions, both in working with Lynn Pries, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based interior designer who has spent much of her career creating high-end residences across the United States and Europe. These days, she mostly works on one project at a time, carefully selecting and purchasing a property herself and then seeing to every design detail, inside and out, from start to finish. So far, we've built
In the premiere issue of WaterShapes in February 1999, Brian Van Bower's first "Aqua Culture" column invoked the name of winemaker Robert Mondavi, calling him a role model for watershapers everywhere. It was a partly surprising place to start a new column, given the fact that Mondavi is neither a contractor, engineer or designer, but Bower, a wine connoisseur as well as a trailblazing watershaper, made a good case for seeing Mondavi's career as a lens through which we might better understand our own. At the time, I didn't completely appreciate the connection between Mondavi and the watershaping trades, but I decided a bit later to pick up the book, Harvests of Joy, and spend some time with it. Prepared by Mondavi with writer Paul Chutkow, the 364-page book was published in 1998 by Harcourt Brace. I know that this is quite a departure from
