education

Unconventional Plaster?
When I started my career more than 20 years ago, habit and standards dictated that swimming pool plaster should be white. By that time, happily, a handful of suppliers had begun offering colored aggregates, and then products including PebbleTec began expanding the palette to a point where about a dozen colors were available, give or take a few. These were shades of blue, mostly, ranging through to grays and darker grays. Then, about ten years ago,
2012/3.2, March 21 — Mark Holden on ART, Working with Stone, Water on Capitol Mall and more
March 21, 2012 WATERSHAPES.COM INTERVIEW It’s All About ART Seizing an opportunity to raise the…
Coming Attractions
Through the past several weeks, I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of conversations about ART – Artistic Resources & Training. It’s the new educational forum being built by Mark Holden and a collection of like-minded professionals (including David Tisherman, Kevin Fleming, Judith Corona and Larry Drasin, among many others) who want to kick the level of instruction and information now available to watershapers and environmental artists up to
Working with Stone the Right Way
Before I get to the meat of this series on using stone in landscapes and as part of aquatic environments, I must address an important concept having to do with how people have built with stone, both historically and in the here and now. The vast majority of stone walls and fences you see today – whether they were built 700 years ago or 70 – were
It’s All About ART
Interview by Jim McCloskeyMark Holden smiles a lot these days, happy with the progress he, David Tisherman and a group of fellow instructors have made in the very short time they’ve been organizing a new educational program. That program, called Artistic Resources & Training – or ART for short – is a spinoff of his years of trying to make the study of watershapes part of the curriculum taught to students of landscape architecture in American universities. Holden is a perpetual-motion machine these days, pulling together
Test Your Knowledge #28
Oil Company Joins USA SwimmingFoundation for Water Safety Program
2012/1.2, January 24 — Appropriate Design, Fort Worth Water Gardens, Ripples and more
January 25, 2012 WATERSHAPES.COM FEATURE ARTICLE What Goes with What? How do you decide what…
All Things Considered
I’ve spent 50 of my years living in Southern California – an exhilarating half-century in which I’ve spent a lot of time, man and boy, in the presence of watershapes of various forms and sizes. The experiences I’ve had have filled me with opinions about the nature of these bodies of water and their accoutrements, so
Custom Pools or Aquatic Art?
Almost every advertisement for watershapes I’ve ever seen in a newspaper or the Yellow Pages says something about “custom” this or “custom” that. It always leads me to wonder how to differentiate between the “custom,” “high-end” and “luxury” pools others devise and the “architectural pools” or, better yet, the “aquatic art” I strive to create. I prefer the last two terms because
What Is a Designer?
When people talk about pools these days and have something ambitious in mind, many of the conversations focus on vanishing edges, perimeter overflows, infinity edges, knife edges, wet decks, disappearing edges and whatever other terms one might use in describing water-in-transit effects. In lots of these cases, if not most, these discussions are misdirected: Just because