dry-deck
In recent years, cities across the United States have found that restoring their old train stations is a great way to attract people and commerce to downtown districts that have seen better days. These revitalization projects have picked up the pace in cities from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and they seem to work best when old, original functions are preserved and mixed in with the new.That's precisely the direction that redevelopment of Denver's historic Union Station has taken: The classic, Beaux Arts-style building, which opened in 1914, lost almost all of the
Sometimes, it’s the unexpected that gives a place its true spirit. That’s been very much the case for The First Church of Christ, Scientist, a 1975 addition to Boston’s historic Back Bay district. The site features a campus plan devised by legendary architects I.M. Pei and Peter Walker, with grounds organized around a
Just as with species in the animal kingdom, architectural construction styles and techniques evolve over time, adapting to changes in the environment. In the case of fountains, these evolutionary transitions have been both complex and indicative of broader trends. Ancient wellsprings, for example, eventually gave way to decorative fountains with intricately carved stone sculptures. More recently, monolithic block, walled and stepped fountain forms have held sway. It's not much of a stretch to say that the latest significant "mutation" in this remarkable lineage is the dry-deck fountain: At a time when open space is at a premium and the public is being invited as never before to interact and participate in the architectural landscape, dry-deck fountains may well be the
It began as the playful vision of Bob and Kat Tudor, husband-and-wife philanthropists and founders of The Smokebrush Theatre in Colorado Springs, Colo., who decided one day to donate a unique fountain to the children of their city. Now that vision, fully realized, belongs to the citizens of this sprawling town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in the form of a dazzling water display and a folksy character named Uncle Wilber. Multi-talented artists in their own rights, the Tudors developed the aesthetic and creative concepts but knew from the start that they would need to enlist advanced technical expertise to
People don't usually have trouble with boundaries and will honor requests to "Keep Out," for example, or leave certain doors to "Employees Only." But there are also cases where we generally take issue with limitations on behavior whether stated or implied, and I can think of no better instance in which this takes place than with water in public spaces. Despite designers' best efforts over the years to make it clear where bathers are welcome and where they are not, the public has steadily defied boundaries by trespassing into waters that were never directly designed for human interaction. In fact, you might say that formal, decorative fountains are a forbidden fruit from which many of us have taken the occasional bite. During the past two decades, watershape designers have looked very specifically at the irresistible urge we have to touch water in an effort to shape all-new boundaries between public nuisance and design nuance. Along the way, we've learned which elements offer a deliberate, positive signal - a real "permission to play" - and are now wielding this power of interactivity to create and define a broad range of
It was one of those projects where aesthetics, technology, function and history all came together. Installed on a pier on the waterfront in Hoboken, N.J., right across the river from the Manhattan skyline, the dry-deck fountain pictured on these pages was part of a civic development movement aimed at creating new public areas on both the New York and New Jersey shores. Our company, Roman Fountains of Albuquerque, N.M., first became involved in the project in 1996, when we