damage prevention

In Service of Trees
'All of us at one time or another run up against trees that are very much in the way - and our clients simply won't let us remove them.  To be sure, working around such prized specimens can be a real pain,' wrote Bruce Zaretsky in his January 2009 On the Level column, 'which is why so many in the construction trades have passive-aggressive attitudes about them and just wish
Water’s Flip Side
For a dozen years, this magazine has celebrated the beauty, majesty and positive potential of water in the landscape.  We’ve seen it flowing down waterfalls, over vanishing edges, across slopes and through the air.  We’ve seen what happens to colors immersed in it, how it creates shimmering light patterns, how it works its way over stone and, perhaps most important, the joy it can bring.   Its potential to entertain and sustain us is indeed vast, but for all of its glories, water can also be inglorious as well – as when rivers overflow their banks, rainfall collapses roofs or tsunamis inundate coastlines.  So while we in the watershaping world are justified in revering water, we also
Sealing the Deal
The latest generation of Las Vegas hotels and casinos offers an amazing showcase for pools, fountains and watershapes of every shape and size.  In fact, for many such properties, the presence of these increasingly imaginative watershapes is crucial to defining their appeal for huge numbers of guests and visitors. As these properties and their watershapes have become more elaborate and unconventional, they've presented designers, engineers and builders with greater and greater technical challenges - many of them carried in the plain fact that water can inflict a great deal of damage on these facilities if it is not properly contained and controlled.   In our end of the watershaping trades, the visual and sensory arms race has challenged the waterproofing industry to step up to the plate and manage the integrity of every nook and cranny of every vessel, be it wide or narrow, curved or straight, below-grade or