construction
India's stepwells are truly amazing, but relatively few people know anything about them. Victoria Lautman wants to change all that, reporting on their long history in a book -- and in a series for WaterShapes on three of the country's most wondrous architectural and cultural treasures.
This edition of the WaterShapes newsletter carries two unusual articles. One is Victoria Lautman's piece on the stepwells of India; the other is Lauren Stack's look at water-related trends and the importance of helping more people learn to
In recent years, I've witnessed or participated in enjoyable conversations about the fact that pools, spas, fountains and other waterfeatures are now more complex than they've ever been. What I've heard and seen less often, however, is equivalent bantering about the fact that engineering plans for such projects must keep pace if these elaborate watershapes are to perform - as they should - well into the future. In this context of progress and success, it should trouble watershapers that large numbers of builders persist in relying on generic structural plans when it's time to break ground on their projects - even on those that
With the effects of the Great Depression still rocking the economy in the mid-1930s, the Works Progress Administration became a major employer and creative force that put many still-treasured public facilities on the map. In fact, there are few cities in the country that don't boast a park, bridge, post office or some other public structure built by some of the millions of laborers who found work through the WPA. In 1937, Vincennes, Ind., was a particularly fortunate beneficiary of WPA's prowess in the form of the Rainbow Beach Aquatic Center - one of the most innovative and distinctive of all such facilities built up to that time. The goals were two: to provide jobs for the unemployed and to address an alarming increase in
This was one of those cases where a project that offers all the indications of a direct path to success took a couple of weird turns that complicated things in unusual ways. The pool and spa are located high up in Trousdale Estates, a canyon-hugging neighborhood above Beverly Hills, Calif. The views are magnificent all the way to downtown Los Angeles in one direction and to the Pacific Ocean in another - and the spaces in which the pool and separate spa had been placed took the fullest possible advantage of those prospects. Our client was a multifaceted home-design/build company that had a distinguished track record with this sort of all-concrete
It all started in the years following World War II, when large parcels of undeveloped suburban land were carved into tracts in which, all too often, as many homes as possible were included to accommodate huge population influxes. In a nutshell, this is why so many of the lots in places like southern California are relatively small. We do lots of our work in these "bedroom communities," and I wish I had a nickel for every time I've been asked to shoehorn full-featured pools and spas into tiny backyards with limited access. It can be done - we at Aqua-Link Pools & Spas (Carlsbad, Calif.) frequently tackle small-yard projects - but each of them carries
As watershapers, we all have one common goal in mind: We don't ever want our concrete pools, spas, fountains or waterfeatures - whatever it is we've just finished building - to move at any time, in any way at all. This is true no matter the physical or geological circumstances. On a slope, on the flat, elevated above a parking garage or set on rock or in sand or clay, wherever we're working, we follow
