finishes
I've been playing with clay for a long time - ever since 1968, when I took my first ceramics class in high school. Clay has captured my imagination mainly with its flexibility: I can carve it, build with it and even color it. For years, I've sculpted pieces of tile out of stoneware and porcelain clay. The individual pieces are then combined to create mosaic compositions, which, among other things, means that I'm able to create works of art that can go just about anywhere and are especially at home in and around water. Now, more than 30 years into working with this wonderful medium as a potter, then as an art student in the United States and Italy and especially in
Finishing up a project of any size is all about the details. From the final touches on the artificial rockwork and the placing and adjusting of lights to the fine tuning of the circulation system and signing off on the equipment room, the art of fine watershaping ultimately boils down to applying the same stringent standards for excellence that you bring to the beginning and middle of the project straight through to the end. Of course, it's virtually impossible to complete a project of this magnitude without
It's a little too easy to lose sight of what holds the most meaning our work as watershapers - even when it's out there in plain view. In fact, if we're to be honest in assessing the palette of finish materials we use, I think most of us would have to concede that these products can become so familiar that thinking creatively about the full spectrum of their possibilities is something that often falls by the wayside. I believe we should be on guard against
One of the skills of a good designer is the ability to recognize those situations in which less is more. The detail pictured in these pages, for example, shows how the choice to go with a small volume of moving water (as opposed to a torrent) can add immeasurably to a composition's visual strength. Using this understated approach helps the designer or builder avoid what has become one of the biggest clichés of modern pool design - that is, the outsized waterfall spilling over a single weir from a raised spa into an adjacent swimming pool. My desire to get away from that monotonous
Lately I've been finding myself in what seems like a fairly unique position: On the one hand, I work as a design consultant for architects and as a designer for high-end customers; on the other, I work as a builder executing the designs that customers and their architects choose. In this dual capacity, I've been able to gather a tremendous amount of input from construction clients and transfer it in one form or another as a consultant. I also have had the opportunity of seeing how decisions made in the design process play out during the construction process. Seeing both sides has led me to certain conclusions, chief among them
It's an art form that connects modern craftspeople to those of the distant past. In fact, the roots of mosaic tiling can be traced to Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., where temple walls were decorated with simple earthenware fragments. Centuries later, the ancient Greeks decorated their courtyards with large and small pebble mosaics, and sophisticated examples of mosaic work are found later in everything from Turkish mosques to Italian basilicas. The Romans, however, probably pushed mosaics about as far as any culture could in the first few centuries A.D. They adorned baths, pools, spas, floors and walls of important buildings as well as humbler residences with intricate mosaics made up of ceramic, stone, glass and marble. Recent years may have seen a revival of this ancient artistic technique, but as can be seen in the accompanying photographs, what many of today's designers are doing with classic forms is a real step forward - a departure from tradition that has made today's mosaics a thoroughly modern form of
