atmosphere
Working on a wide range of projects in a wide range of locales for a broad range of clients is an interesting way to make a living, I have to say, but in some cases the projects we participate in are so high end that we know we'll only ever experience the finished product in pictures. A case in point is the Ani Villas, a resort property in Dikwella on the southern edge of Sri Lanka, a large island off the southern coast of India. It's a water lover's paradise, with 270-degree views of the Indian Ocean as well as grounds dotted by multiple watershapes: two large main pools, numerous small private plunges for certain guest rooms, a pair of pools for kids, a weeping wall to greet visitors and a river/cascade system through portions of the property. It's an amazing place, and I'm proud to say we
From the streets of London to the forbidding environs of horror movies, fog has always been capable of stirring our imaginations. It's the stuff clouds are made of and an enduring symbol of mystery, and it's not too surprising that enterprising people would try to figure out how to generate and use this most elemental of atmospheric vapors as a practical tool and distinctive design element. To start our story, let's flash back to 1970, when the first-ever artificial-fog system made its debut at the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan, as part of Pepsi's revolutionary Pavilion of the Clouds. Just a year earlier, my father, cloud expert Tom Mee, had founded Mee Industries to provide instrumentation that was to enable the government to do a better job of studying clouds and airborne pollution. I can only imagine what it was like for him to receive a call from Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, who asked him to develop a system that would generate a cloud to would enfold the outside of a 200-foot dome as a key element of her design for the pavilion. Interestingly, Nakaya was the daughter of the man who had pioneered snowmaking technology, and I've always been intrigued that she wanted to make a
During a lifetime of driving up and down the part of Sunset Boulevard where it finally meets the Pacific Ocean, I'd often noticed the sign pointing to "Lake Shrine" but had never taken the time to stop and have a look. I suppose the "shrine" part of it made me think it was the exclusive preserve of adherents or members of the Self-Realization Fellowship - an organization I knew nothing about other than that their facility was in one of Los Angeles' most beautiful locations. I finally overcame my hesitation about visiting the Lake Shrine a couple years ago, when a friend told me it was a place where people of all faiths and religions were welcome to stroll, meditate and enjoy the tranquility of the setting. Curiosity overcame skepticism and I finally visited the place. What I found at the Lake Shrine was a serene, calm, meditative oasis of lush, beautiful gardens surrounding a lake. To this day many years later, the minute I drive through the entrance gate, I'm always swept up by sensations of serenity and peace - and have since
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
We all know how much watershapes add to the beauty of any setting, but I suspect we also tend to take for granted the integral role water plays in sustaining those environments. It's obvious that no landscape would survive long without a steady infusion of water to nurture its plants. Less obvious, however, are ways in which water can be used to make some places more hospitable to other life forms that inhabit them. This isn't really new. As has been noted in several articles published in WaterShapes, water has been used in arid climates for centuries as a prime source of "air conditioning" for
