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Local historians claim that the image of Philadelphia's Fairmount Water Works was the most reproduced of any industrial site in the United States through the first half of the 19th Century - and for good reason. At that time, the facility represented the absolute state of the art and served as a major point of pride for local residents as well as a source of fascination to visitors from near and far. Throughout its long history, the facility was indeed at the leading edge of water-delivery technology and is now the ideal place to capture and tell the story of the development of environmentalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The story begins
June 6, 1944, was a cold, dark, cloudy day along the northern coast of France. When the Higgins boats carrying allied troops slapped their gangways into the cold sea 60 years ago this month and released their human cargo onto the beach, withering machine gun fire greeted the soldiers from German bunkers high above the beach. Before the day was over, 6,603 Americans had lost their lives in what became known as D-Day - the start of the allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. When planning started for a National D-Day Memorial to be built in Bedford, Va., the project's
When you look at this project in finished form, there's no way to see the months of struggle or the overall level of difficulty that went into its creation. You don't see the fact, for example, that we discovered while excavating the courtyard that the house itself was in imminent danger of collapsing. You don't see that the narrow access way buckled when we first started working, or the ugly trauma of the broken septic tank. You can't see the continuous changes in thought, direction and design that went into the deck, or the tremendous time and effort required to make the
Through all the centuries of watershape design, the laws of physics have imposed restrictions on the watershaper's ability to extend a laminar flow of sheeting water beyond a drop of five or six feet. Go much beyond that limit and the sheet breaks up, thus impairing the aesthetic effect, causing an annoying degree of splashing and generating an abundance of undesirable, monotonous noise. Those physical laws have been seriously bent in public spaces in recent times. Indeed, special weirs and nozzles have made it possible to achieve laminar flows of 12 feet or more. Up until now, the solutions employed to achieve these effects have usually been beyond the budget of smaller commercial projects or residential clients - but that's changing. At my firm, Crystal Fountains, we've long been studying the phenomenon of falling water with an eye toward maximizing the surface tension of water and thereby extending the "laminar" effect without breaking the bank. We've had the luxury of working on some high-end projects that enabled us to perform the research and development necessary to do that stretching. By adapting some of the design ideas we
It's an age-old paradox, this relationship between art and science. On the face of it, things artistic may seem solely the realm of high-flying thinkers and philosophers who spend their days at the far reaches of interpretation and meaning. By contrast, engineers and scientists would seem to be dealing purely in the certainties of what is quantifiable and real. The truth is, I don't know of a modern art form that doesn't involve technology of some kind. Conversely, most branches of modern science call upon researchers to apply a great deal of intuition and creativity to the processes of exploration and discovery. In other words, neither the arts nor the sciences could exist without ideas and disciplines derived from the other. That's especially true when it comes to water systems. Whether created for aesthetic or recreational purposes, art and science can come together here in a particularly compelling and interesting way. By combining technical disciplines with
Ever since the hydraulic principles of ancient Persia were 'rediscovered' by Europeans during the Renaissance, the sky has literally been the limit for watershape designers. At the 17th-century Dutch Palace of Het Loo, for example, fountain jets that trace their developmental history at least as far back as 8th-century Persia make an emphatic statement about the power of those who commissioned them. We all marvel, and rightly so, at the waterfeatures of Renaissance Italy, the pools of Versailles in France, the fountains of the
This waterfall could've been built in either of two ways: A system of internal reservoirs and a long, narrow nozzle could've been formed as part of the structure itself, a task that would've placed huge burdens on the forming crew and the person shooting the gunite; or a manufactured fixture could be used to create the desired effect. Sensibly, the folks at Tango Pools in Las Vegas chose to pursue the latter option, deciding it would be better to
