fountain design
Toronto-based Crystal Fountains has designed a dramatic, multifunctional waterfeature for White Square Office Center, a major new commercial development in Moscow. The company describes
Part I: Setting the Course Theatrical vitality has to do with structuring stories and creating dramatic narratives that establish sensations of expectation, surprise and reward. It also involves the development of sympathetic, interesting characters as well as engagement in “the moment” – the feeling that a special and wonderful entertainment experience is unfolding before the audience in a specific time and place. Mastering all of that is a tall order under ordinary circumstances, so you can imagine how we felt in trying to help make it happen on the exposed, unpredictable stern deck of Oasis of the Seas – a prestigious ship that currently claims the title of world’s largest cruise liner. Fluidity – a Los Angeles-based water design studio – pursues unique, progressive projects for an international clientele that includes architects, landscape architects, civic institutions and real estate developers. Through the years, we’d had considerable experience with theatrical
Boston’s Big Dig was essentially a Big Fix. Officially known as the Central Artery Tunnel Project, it served to repair damage done to the heart of the city by the Interstate Highway program during the 1950s and ’60s. In Boston’s case, the federal government had stepped in and inserted a primary traffic artery through what had been a downtrodden area near the waterfront. Its intentions may have been good, but I-93 ran north to south and separated the city’s historic downtown area from its storied waterfront – a disastrous decision that did little more than create decades’ worth of traffic nightmares. Ultimately, it also required remediation on a scale seldom seen in the course of human history. Planning for the project began in 1982, initiating what would become
For years, Montréal’s arts district has been the venue for music and theater performances, art exhibitions, festivals and all manner of cultural events. As part of a revitalization process in the area, notes David L’Heureux, the city recently unveiled the Place des Festivals and a spectacular watershape he and a distinguished design team built at its heart as a gathering place for residents and visitors of all ages and a civic focus for fun, relaxation and visual joy. Throughout North America in recent years, cities have turned to a variety of watershapes to enliven and, occasionally, revitalize their public spaces. These watershapes are more than the wonderful fountains long found in public parks and plazas. Indeed, the recent success of projects including Chicago’s Millennium Park and its ambitious combination of significant waterfeatures with gardens, architecture and art has demonstrated the tremendous potential that lies in crafting interesting, multi-functional places for people to gather. Canada offers a spectacular recent example of this trend in the form of
{Multithumb} When second-generation metalworker and sculptor Kris Kesler wanted to take his custom waterfeatures to a higher, more artistic level, he took off his welding mask and picked up a computer mouse. It’s been liberating, he says, enabling him to design everything from simple scuppers to hurricane-proof fountains and take care of the details that make them work on screen before he puts his hands in gloves and goes at it with hammer and tongs. Growing up in a family of industrial and commercial fabricators, I was steeped from an early age in traditional metalworking techniques – hammering, planishing, leather-sandbag shaping and my favorite, torch welding. Learning at my father’s knee in his commercial steelwork factory led me to admire the artistry of craftspeople as they transformed raw hunks of metal into functional and often beautiful works of art. The power of that experience has always stuck with me. Later in life, when I decided to launch my own water- and fire-feature company, I was excited to get back behind the welding mask and
Wanting to soften and humanize the austere appearance of a new facility for homeless families, the benefactors of the Orange County Rescue Mission in Tustin, Calif., commissioned an unusual watershape. The idea pulled watershaper Mark Holden and project manager Jim Bucklin into a whirlwind in which they had to create unique systems to accommodate the world’s largest ceramic amphora – and do so within an extraordinarily tight deadline. What happens when one of the country’s wealthiest philanthropists provides funding for a truly unique art piece in support of a favorite cause? The short answer is, everyone jumps to make it happen. That was literally the situation when a nonprofit organization that serves the needs of homeless families received a donation from its largest benefactor to fund construction of an unusual fountain system. The waterfeature, we learned, was to support the world’s largest amphora, which at that time was just being completed by a Danish artist. Destined for the courtyard of a new facility about to be
Advances in fountain technology have defined a new class of animated watershapes that is not only more sophisticated but is also becoming more readily available. Here, Simon Gardiner of Crystal Fountains shares a pair of projects to illustrate how just two of these technologies – that is, submersible LED lighting and systems that make water dance – are helping his company and others bring fresh excitement to watershapes worldwide. The international fountain business is an exciting, highly competitive and ever-challenging field, basically because the clients are as distinctive as the projects they commission, the settings they provide and the countries they represent. At Crystal Fountains (Toronto), we’ve staked our reputation in the global marketplace on understanding those distinctions and built our competitive edge on keeping up with technological developments that help us animate spaces with water. The reason this constant forward progress in technology is so critical is that there’s a persistent, ongoing
Oregon watershaper Giorgos Eptaimeros has developed a reputation for providing his clients with the full range of exciting aquatic experiences. Always on the lookout for new options to offer and, more specifically, for ways to bring popular commercial- and waterpark-type features to his residential projects, he recently turned to a leaping-jet/splash-pad kit to bring a dynamic backyard play feature to a distinctly mid-range project. When I emigrated from Greece to the United States nearly 20 years ago, I already had more than a decade of commercial project management experience under my belt. As is the case with
The availability of new and different materials has been a driving force behind the design revolution that has defined the watershaping industry for the past ten years. One key to that development, observes Kirk Butler of Cactus Stone & Tile, has been the willingness of suppliers to step into more progressive roles as purveyors of unique products that have blown the creative process wide open for watershape designers and builders – and their clients. In our business as a stone and tile supplier, we’ve often heard in the past 35 years that designers and contractors get tired of repetition: They come to us, they say, hoping to find things that inspire them to create projects that are new, unique and exciting. Frankly, we on the supply side are subject to the same sentiment: While we may be intimately familiar with materials our designers and builders have used over and over again and have no objection to working with the tried and true, we’re restless, too, and are always trying to find something new to bring to the table. Whether we’re working with a pool designer, a landscape architect, an interior designer, a home builder or even a homeowner, we believe everyone benefits from access to a wide array of quality products and materials. In our case at Cactus Stone & Tile (Phoenix, Ariz.), this means we literally travel the world to find and procure the widest possible range of hard-surface products, be it stone or tile. We beat the bushes across Europe and Asia and visit the far reaches of South America, dropping in on trade shows and fairs, introducing ourselves at quarries and processing facilities and doing whatever it takes to
A Fountain of Watershaping Insights